Nope... Just nope. It'd have to be a team as free of bias and/or headcanons as possible, or things could go out of hand quite fast. It could be a good start, as long as the team kept good heads on their shoulders. Great things begget great responsibilities...
I think having multiple continuities/canons/whatever is a bad solution. Splitting your resources across different interpretations of a franchise is bad from a business standpoint as it is inefficient and leads to a fractured fanbase. Look at the annoyance Overlord expressed when he couldn’t get his PAL Origins Plus art lol. Sega pulled this shit already in the 90s and still feels the effects. Sonic Team just needs to get their shit together on the Japanese/creative-side and ensure there is a singular interpretation of Sonic that all their teams actually abide by. Or you can make an OVA-inspired continuity and I’ll be happy. HARD disagree on this. It needs to be a singular person. “Teams” are where these confusions all stemmed from. Creative works need to have a singular vision. Sure, some other people should be involved to bring up potential inconsistencies, but they should not be involved in putting out their own ideas without going through a single individual.
One way or another has its caveats. Even that OVA-inspired continuity would get so. See Sonic X as an example. As you said before, SoA might have more power nowadays over the franchise, given most multimedia projects come from the west, not Japan. SoJ seems to care only about new games, they might not even entertain the possibility of a reboot or definitive parallel continuities, it's all SoA. I noticed, but felt like giving my opinion anyways... ^^"
I don't really like the idea of rebooting the Sonic games. Ian Flynn has expressed interest in wanting to do a reboot, but his vision is one that plans out basically the whole story from the beginning. And I don't know if I would want that for the games. Plus we are kinda already getting that in the movies anyway. Not everything was planned out from the start but for the most part it is the vision of one creative team. So I think the movies scratch that itch for wanting perfect continuity. For the games I just want SEGA to continue to experiment. Give us some more new fresh ideas. I love it when Sonic turns into a werewolf or uses a sword and we're certainly not going to get that in a film. So at the end of the day, I just want Sonic Team to continue the path they've already set up rather than starting over from the beginning.
That's why I also suggested that they could stop compromising to one single continuity, Mario doesn't care about continuity and the series is doing just fine. If they can't keep things consistent, they should stop pretending it's all one continuous story, because they aren't convincing me. Also, It's possible to have long-running series that makes sense, Touhou has more than 30 games and even more print works, yet the world feels a lot more cohesive and makes a lot more sense than Sonic... this hasn't always been the case tho, the PC98 games are very weird because ZUN was just messing around when creating them, eventually he rebooted the series in Touhou 6 on windows and compromised with this new story and new world (and yes, technically speaking, PC98 hasn't been confirmed to be non-canon, but its stories are completely irrelevant and there are many contradictions and parallels introduced in the windows canon, so the message is pretty clear). What Sonic lacks is a clear direction, Sega has no idea what they want, so they just do absolutely everything. That's precisely what bothers me about them retroactively trying to fix new stories and pretend that they work with the new direction they want for the series. They seem to be determined on making it work going forward tho, so I don't see why not just make a reboot. Even if it doesn't work, I still thing that CREATIVELY speaking, this is what makes the most sense
Actually, Mario does have continuity. To the point you could conceivably get a working timeline from the games. I'd like to see them do an Ultimate Sonic universe if they're going to do such things. Don't replace the actual canon with the Sammy Canon, just do a new universe to the side and see if that works out. And considering he wrote Sonic Origins, I would not be optimistic.
Because Mario has no real continuity is why I prefer Sonic games. I don't think erasing previous Sonic continuity would help the franchise. And a big difference between Sonic and Mario is that Mario is mostly just a video game character. We haven't gotten a new Mario TV Show or Comicbook for decades. No one is playing Mario for the story outside the JRPGs. Sonic fans do get much more invested into the story, which is why this thread exists. I got into Sonic really through Sonic X. Other fans got into it through the Archie comics. And new fans are going to get into Sonic through the movies or Sonic Prime on Netflix. I don't think everything needs to line up perfectly either to enjoy a story. I was able to enjoy Sonic Frontiers and Sonic Prime despite knowing the lore behind them is inconsistent. I don't think a reboot or Mario approach is needed. Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 even have a lot of inconsistences in their plots but people still enjoy their stories and discussing them online to this day.
How so? Could you be a bit more specific, if possible? Also, SEGA experimenting with the games for DECADES led the fanbase to the clusterfuck we still deal with to these days. If you're one who prefers gameplay over storytelling, then yes, you've been getting your bread and butter. I majorly grew up with the games and those are what truly matter to me. In a storytelling kind of way, I mean. Canon and continuity are a mess, they gotta be fixed in the best possible way. And by best I mean a way WAY better than what SEGA's doing nowadays, that's only screwing things up even more, IMHO.
When asked if what he would do with total control over the Sonic brand, Ian said he would start over with Modern Sonic at least, and let Classic continue in the direction that started in Mania.
It used to make sense to have multiple continuities for Sonic, because there used to be a lot of competing interpretations of the world and characters that SEGA struggled to keep control of. But nowadays dividing these stories into separate timelines only stands to diminish them. Sonic Prime having a mistake or two in its dialogue is not an equal tradeoff to the context established by the idea of it being the same Sonic and co. from the games. If you cut that world off from everything else, the world is a lot smaller, and that's a bigger deal than whether every single part of it is cross-referenced with every game and all their respective mistakes. Sonic's continuity is and always has been a little loose and borked, and while that causes problems and needs a lot of patchwork to fix, fracturing it further with other timelines or a reboot helps nobody. We're not gonna see Freedom Fighters in a post-nuclear fantasy world no matter what canon it's in, so why make a separate canon at all? At it's best, that's more experiences under the characters' belts, more context to the situations. At worst, it's complaint-fodder for the "I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder" guy from The Simpsons, and I don't care about that guy's opinion. Now sure, you don't want your story to be shackled to things that suck and make the canon worse, but those problems go back to...well, Heroes at least. But hey, they didn't try to make the movies canon, and that means they do have discretion where it actually matters. The vast majority of all changes made to the canon in the last couple years are not only better from most storytelling perspectives, they make the series way more accessible to people who aren't as deep in the weeds as us. It's why it's hilarious to see Sonic referencing a comic character cited as a bad thing, when that's the series finally doing some cross-promotion for once! You hear about Shadow, you go play SA2. You hear about Tangle, you go read IDW. You don't play Mega Collection and see the Archie cover where Sonic roots around inside Rotor's innards and have to learn what Rotor, the portable Roboticizer and the "French Frirus" is.
I get where you're coming from and, while that'd certainly all but eliminate inconsistencies, it'd severely limit the output and longevity of the franchise and frankly runs the risk of being pretty boring. The past few years of Sonic have been a minor renaissance for the little blue gremlin and it's not because the direction has been dictated by a singular aueteur's vision. We've had Whitehead, Stealth and co. (including a bunch of folks on the American side of SEGA) giving us Mania and Origins, the "true" Sonic Team headed by Iizuka and Kishimoto bringing out Frontiers, Ian Flynn and Evan Stanley and a whole bunch of artists producing a consistently strong ongoing comic, with the likes of Daniel Barnes and the social media team producing more out there stories like Scrapnik Island and Murder of, while Tyson Hesse and Powerhouse (among other animation studios) have entertained us with superb animations. And of course, the original were never just a one man show. Sonic has been a collaborative IP since the beginning and has played host to myriad different voices who've all left their stamp on the franchise in one way or another. Sure, oftentimes things are imperfect and messy, but I don't for one second think that removing such oddities is worth sacrificing the diversity of artists and inspirations that have helped make the series what it is, as well as those who will continue to do so in the future.
Also the characters not being in-character, histories seeming to have changed to revolve around Green Hill Zone, Chaos Emeralds apparently being found in rocks now, etcetc. It's not just one or two lines of dialogue, there's a lot wrong with Sonic Prime.
I get your point, but the risk of being “boring” is entirely up to the person in charge. We’ve had things like One Piece running for nearly 30 years that have been spearheaded by a single person (I’ve never read it or seen it - so maybe this is a bad example, but its popularity suggests it’s not boring). I’m not saying additional people can’t work on projects, but there needs to be a single person whose intent is felt throughout and whose judgment is final. In all seriousness, I’ve rather let @BlackHole do his thing alone than leave it up to whatever lore team Sega cobbles together, who’ll likely end up sanitizing the series and giving us some homogenized mush. And this isn’t a knock at you, @BlackHole lol. I loved your animatic for an accurate 3K opening in Origins.
As a One Piece fan, the problem I know it has is more so the mangaka Eiichiro Oda doesn't get to have free time. He has to sleep less to get One Piece done. It would be way better if he did work with a bigger creative team so he can more often go outside and live life.
I did consider this when writing my response, but ultimately I don't think it's comparable. While JoJo's and One Piece and so on are immensely successful and entertaining, they're singular, linear stories and their multimedia endeavours are both lesser in their volume and frequency than Sonic's and oftentimes retell the story of the primary piece of media anyway. Meanwhile, Sonic is an IP that regularly puts out concurrent pieces of media developed independently from one another by different teams and people. It's just not the same as writing a manga, no matter how long that manga is. The collaborative approach of Sonic's continuity and canon does also allow for the revision of less popular elements imho, which I greatly appreciate.
Still awaiting the rest of those animated sequences @BlackHole seemed eager to produce, at the time...
Thank you kindly, though I'm fully aware my choices in continuity are not everyone's cup of tea so no worries there! I'm still eager, but I've got work I get up at 4am for and get home at 8pm, so my time is kind of taken up. I'm only here now since I have tonsilitis. I want to do them properly, with Blender, so I'm trying to figure that out and do it in a style similar to the actual one seen, since I've maintained the artstyle itself is gorgeous and should've been put toward something far better written, or Sonic: Man of the Year - Part Two. The story's there, I just need to, y'know, get it done.
