On the contrary, I can't stand the Big Rings. They slow the game pace down a hell of a lot more than 50 rings do, since you're naturally going to grab 50 rings eventually anyway, so the Special Stage is simply a reward for doing well and holding onto your rings. There is no fucking way you are ever going to get all the Super Emeralds in 3&K without going out of your way to search and explore for secret areas, which isn't something a Sonic game should be encouraging. Finding them purely by circumstance, on a casual playthrough, is laughable. It's possible to stumble onto 7 of them, enough to unlock Doomsday Zone, but definitely not all 14. So when a Sonic game is encouraging me to jump into random walls to see if there could possibly be a secret area behind them, and do slow methodical platforming to get onto weird paths that are hard to reach otherwise in order to find a Special Stage, there's something wrong. I should be able to go fast and keep moving forward and still be eligible for Super Sonic. I shouldn't have to alter my playstyle. Sonic 2 has the perfect balance for that, where it still rewards exploration without asking the player to stretch out the time limit.
I don't know, man. I like both, and I also like the getting-50-rings-at-the-end-of-the-stage method. Couldn't care less about "slowing the game down" because I don't believe in that. The core mechanics will allow and force you to use Sonic's main abilities either way: both exploration and survival inherently depend on Sonic's speed and the player's skill with it, so both are welcome. But more than all of that, I like that both offer a margin of error, which is sorely missed in the newer games (especially the Advance ones). Like, red rings are like big rings, but you have to get all 180 of them in Sonic Colors to get Super Sonic, and I hate that. In fact, the lack of a certain margin for you to play as you like is one of the things I dislike the most about post-Classic games. You either get all of the secrets or it's for nothing.
Maybe I'm the odd one out, but when I first played Sonic the Hedgehog, I played it the way someone would play a platformer. It's an excellent platformer, with occasional sections that encourage speed. When you go into it expecting speed for a majority of the time, I think your experience will be diminished. As much as I like going fast, I sometimes think other games (especially fan-made) tend to put *too much* emphasis on it, as if that's the only thing that makes a good Sonic game. More platforming, please! I don't mind taking my time.
Unpopular opinion about this: Sonic Mania does that too a little bit too often. Studiopolis Act 2 is the clearest example of this, and is one of the less interesting levels for that.
The S3K's big ring and the S1's big ring are two different beasts and it all comes down to personal preference. S3K's encourages you to explore the levels, while S1's encourages you to be good/cautious. Usually I don't want to explore (there are exceptions), I just want to go through the levels the fastest I can, so to me S1's works much better. But S3's is a clever way to make the player explore the levels, so I think both big rings should coexist somehow.
To be entirely fair, Yuji Naka himself kind of expressed a similar sentiment at one point Now granted, I don't really agree with this sentiment or the one Maekawa has expressed but there does seem to be this belief that Sonic's classic design is more "kid friendly" than his modern incarnation. Even nowadays, classic Sonic orientated products are generally much more lighthearted and whimsical than the normal Modern stuff.
I don’t know if this is an unpopular opinion so much as just an obscure one, but I preferred when Sega hired actual young boys to do Tails’ voice over adult women doing their typical “raspy little boy” voice. No disrespect to any of Tails’ English VAs since Amy Palant (I think Sonic X was the first time they did that), they’re all pretty much fine, but I just found the performances in the Adventure games (and for that matter, the two DiC cartoons) much more distinct and authentic because of it. I know a ton of people have criticized Corey Bringas’ acting in the SA games (I think Corey was his SA2 voice and his brother played him in SA1?), but let’s be real, the acting is pretty terrible across the board, it’s just easier to single out kids. Not a fan of the kid they hired in Heroes though, he sounded way too young.
It's not an unpopular opinion to say Roger's Sonic voice is awful, but it is unpopular to say Jason's voice sucks too. I'm seeing a lot more kids now who grew up with Jason rather than Drummond and so they prefer him, but I just don't get what they see in him. Every single LINE he's ever deLIVered goes UP and DOWN like THIS, even in Black Knight where he was starting to improve. Neither he nor Roger can deliver a sincere line to save their life, every single thing that's ever come out of Sonic's mouth from them has sounded fake as hell.
Even if you don't think Sonic 1 holds up as well compared to the sequels, you have to remember how people experienced that game when it first came out and really had no equal on the market at the time which ultimately helped it gain its popularity.
As far as Jason's appeal, I can answer that. And the answer for me personally is exactly what you just said. Well, fake isn't the word I'd use, in as much just weird, awkward, and exaggerated... Which might be considered the same thing, but just in different words. I consider it charming, in the same way I view the OVA voice as charming. Then again, I grew up at least partially on Riders and Unleashed PS2, which were some of my favorite games growing up. So maybe it is just bias.
I almost got a heartache when some people said Sonic is not about exploration, that his games have to be fast. I wouldn't play Sonic if it was just about to be fast, I wouldn't play Sonic if there wasn't something out there in the levels to discover. And it's hard to make a good hard Sonic level without asking you to think twice before running, in fact "fast" games also do and they put spikes and botomless pits everywhere without warning or any sense. Automation even in classic games is mostly worthless, you'll go "fast" but you won't be playing while it lasts. The only thing I can agree about is they should convey or make hidden corridors a bit more distinct to not try to go through every wall in the games.
I got so used to Tails sounding the way he has since... Sonic X I guess?... that I forgot how he sounded in Sonic Adventure until several months ago when I watched the game's cut scenes again for the first time in a long time. And wow! It's different for sure. But despite the acting skill generally, the voice itself isn't terrible. It sounds more genuine, unlike many anime-esque voices which I believe the current Tails voice sounds like.
Alright, idk exactly how unpopular these are, but here goes: - Ray's glide is vastly superior to Tails' flight. Both abilities distinguish their respective characters from Sonic by giving them the potential to access unique areas that he can't, but Tails' flight breaks the pace of the game in a way that is much less fun or interesting, especially when Tails still does not have a flight cancel. They both fill the role of "the character that flies", but Tails' flight makes exploration feel more tedious and unsatisfying given how trivial the reward often is. - "The Metamorphosis", despite not even being composed by Hideki Naganuma, is the single greatest track on the Sonic Rush OST. Thank you, Teruhiko Nakagawa! - On that note, Blaze the Cat is one of the best-designed characters to come out of the Sonic universe, and her relegation to merely being a party game / spin-off character is absolutely criminal. They had the chance to finally shift Sonic into a series that has 1 strong woman (the games, not the comics), and it was a character that iirc a lot of people really liked on her own merits. - The progression of difficulty in Classic Sonic games has almost never been done right. Designing late game levels that are filled with flat, blocky platforming with no slopes or ramps or ways to build speed or take advantage of the game's movement mechanics feels like missed potential. This progression is evident in pretty much every classic game save for Sonic 1, which alternates between 1 slopey stage followed by 1 blocky stage throughout the entire game, and now that I think about it that's kind of genius. - Sonic & the Black Knight was fun. Not really an objective statement on the game's quality, it was just fun. - Desert Palace Zone is more akin to what Sandopolis should've been. Weakest stage in the game IMO. - If there is ever another Classic Sonic title, character movement needs to be reworked. Not in the sense that the past movement is bad or the physics need changing, but because of how strong those first two things are, the series has what feels like a lot of unrealized potential. The dropdash is an amazing addition to the game that keeps the pace going in a way that still rewards the player for being skillful and interacting with the environment in creative ways, and abilities like Sonic Galactic's walldash, Knuckles' wall-spindash in Advance 3, Tails' flight cancel in some fangames (I think that's been a thing in an official game too but I can't remember where), and Knuckles being able to spindash out of a glide-land add a layer of depth to the movement. And that depth creates a potential for "power users" to have more fun, while new users still have the option to run and jump with one button the same way they did before.
I wouldn't rule out the possibility that Roger Craig Smith doesn't sound real because the writing is poor. Roger voiced in the Graff and Pontac era, the same era that had Sonic stories stoop to such a low some fanfictions were more compelling. I wouldn't be surprised if Graff and Pontac's soulless writing somehow affected the voice acting.
Thank you so much for being the only other person I've ever seen who picked up on Griffith's obnoxious inflection. I used to point this out constantly on a different Sonic forum and no one else understood what I meant. His Shadow has the same problem, just in reverse, the inflection falls instead of rising like it does with Sonic. I disagree about Roger and don't really have a problem with his voice acting, but man, is it refreshing to see someone else point out; "i'm sONic, sONic the hEDgeHOg".
On the topic of voice actors, in my opinion, Ryan Drummond is the worst Sonic voice actor. I'm gonna get burned at the stake by the people who grew up with the adventure era games here, but he really does. He just sounds so insincere with every line he delivers, like a robot. His only real good scene is probably the iconic "What you see is what you get" scene where he sounds pretty decent, but otherwise it's just peak early 2000s video game voice acting. I dislike Roger's Sonic as much as the next guy, but no matter how cringey the lines he says are or how fake cool he sounds, he at least always sounds like a real person saying sentences that they mean instead of just spewing words with no meaning or sincerity behind them.
The timeline isn’t that important, and fans think about it way harder than SEGA ever intended them to.
Unleashed's Day Stages, and by extension the boost formula, is the closest we've ever gotten to a classic Sonic game in terms of core design since 1994. The pinball physics came from wanting a stylish, fast platformer - not the other way around. Unleashed's level design is some of the best in the franchise, and most people who complain that there's no branching paths haven't bothered replaying the levels and exploring them. I'd argue Generations' took a step back by pandering to a crowd who doesn't even like the gameplay in the first place, and the levels suffer by having a distinct, clear "fast path, average path, slow path" that discourages replayability.
Did I miss something? I distinctly remember when people said they liked Roger's Sonic voice, and absolutely hated Jason's. Must be a generational thing. I for one like Ryan, Roger, and Jason in that order. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it!
