The younger fandom, and how they learned from exactly none of our mistakes.

Thank goodness AoStH, SatAM & ArchieSonic went by me. I sure don't regret not having grown up with them...at all.

 

What was the name of that fansite back in the mid-2000s that had an article about all the different Sonic fan types? (Accompanied by drawings of what these fans probably look like)

I've been trying to find it on the Wayback Machine!

EDIT: Found it! Was on Concept Mobius:

https://web.archive.org/web/2007102...ius.technoguild.com/info/sonicfandomindex.htm

 

See Josh, your opinion is so interesting to me because I don't feel this disconnect between Adventure Sonic and Classic Sonic that you do. I'm actually honestly not able to see the differences at all! When I see Sonic in Mania do that little flourish after finishing an act or SA2 Sonic go "WHOO! That was cool!" after an A-rank, the two don't feel any separate from me at all--they feel like both the same character. Classic was just cool in a 90's radical sense, Adventure was cool in the cheesy pop punk skater sense. They are both some kind of "cool" to me. I have a very hard time even seeing what exactly is so different to you about them to begin with, making it quite hard to coherently explain why I don't think they're different--I'm not even sure what angle to justify them. They just feel similar to me in a way you don't.

Now of course, perhaps I simply retroactively view Classic with a lens of "coolness", so of course my mind makes these connections a guy like you for whom the Adventure era was a bizarre distortion of the classics you grew up with. That could be true.

t̶h̶e̶ ̶b̶e̶s̶t̶ ̶s̶o̶n̶i̶c̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶c̶l̶e̶a̶r̶l̶y̶ ̶S̶n̶a̶p̶c̶u̶b̶e̶'̶s̶ ̶r̶e̶a̶l̶-̶t̶i̶m̶e̶-̶f̶a̶n̶d̶u̶b̶ ̶s̶o̶n̶i̶c̶ ̶a̶n̶y̶w̶a̶y̶ ̶b̶u̶t̶ ̶h̶e̶'̶s̶ ̶h̶o̶n̶e̶s̶t̶l̶y̶ ̶p̶r̶e̶t̶t̶y̶ ̶s̶i̶m̶i̶l̶a̶r̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶S̶A̶2̶ ̶S̶o̶n̶i̶c̶ ̶l̶o̶l̶

However I do want to point out that SA2 Shadow was actually not much of a brooding antihero and more a completely silly dorkazoid. While the fandom--and then canon portrayals literally a game later--took him to be that kind of Sasuke-style character, SA2 Shadow was honestly a hilariously cheesy dorklord. Like, look at this goofiness:



this dude literally goes from talking about how Maria's death shaped him to talking about the Terminator and Burnout 3 in like, five sentences

Lord, I miss when the series was this unironically goofy as shit. What you consider poorly-executed cashgrabs a bunch of people like me just unironically think is a bunch of incredibly charming cheesiness. Like I know that as you read this image, you probably think it's the stupidest thing in existence and absolutely embarrassing, but man. I'd rather have this kind of stupid as shit goofiness than what Sonic currently is. Really, what's going on is that a lot of people like me are going through this sentiment:

"Shadow the hedgehog is just so cool... nobody designs characters that cool anymore. Why? Because they're afraid. A bunch of nerds with reddit accounts decided Shadow wasn't cool and everybody believed them. Nerds dont know anything about cool. Shadow is cool as fuck"

The overall trend for Sonic since Unleashed is to shy away from this kind of earnest, utterly unironic, and goofy as hell cheesiness, and when I critique the tone and feeling of those games, this is what I mean. I truly, earnestly, seriously want Sonic to be just go "fuck it" and just stop being ironic.

(and also bring the classic formula into 3D)

 

What do those Shadow "quotes" have to do with his personality in SA2?

 

You mean like how Shadow's VA says pretty much the exact same kind of goofy stuff in the Twitter Takeovers?

 

Because Shadow in SA2 was more than just a nihilistic edgelord, he was also a complete dork. He was the exact same kind of confident dorkiness that Sonic embodies, he was just a subdued take on it. Every other game after turned him into a boring as hell edgelord, but Shadow at first was a dude whose first scene was cheesily telling Eggman "I WILL GRANT YOU ONE WISH". He's a hedgehog who insistently calls himself the ULTIMATE LIFE FORM. When you get an A-rank, he says "I'M THE COOLEST", something that makes zero sense with his modern interpretation but makes total sense if you view him as being like...well, Sonic.

He is a cool dork. Sonic is a cool dork. Sonic before Unleashed was a dorky-ass series about a bunch of cartoon animals who were all cheesy goofballs in a charming earnest way.

I mean...there was a reason people really liked those? Because they brought back that charm we missed for so long?

You guys keep trying to "gotcha" me and I do not get why.

 

Shadow having a big ego has nothing to do with what kind of movies or snack foods he apparently likes. Those quotes don't necessarily match anything he says or does in the game. That's all I was getting at. If you want to make a point about Shadow's personality in SA2 vs. subsequent titles, then it would be better to reference the actual game you're talking about and not a presumably non-canon internet fake interview.

I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying, I just don't think the image you posted actually had much to do with your argument. I also wouldn't describe Sonic and Shadow as dorks.

 

????

That's an official thing from SEGA for a game website according to the tweet I got it from.

In fact they provided a link to the actual thing here: https://web.archive.org/web/20160610064830/http://www.1up.com/previews/shadow-the-hedgehog_2

"So we went directly to Shadow -- the character (with answers coming from the creators at Sonic Team) -- to get his thoughts on everything from regrets to influences to his relationship with Sonic. Check it out:"

 

One of the biggest issues I personally have with the stories in recent games, particularly Lost World and Forces, is that the Climax is rather... anticlimactic.

In Lost World, the Deadly Six sucked life away from the planet, Amy and Knuckles are in danger, Eggman seemingly sacrificed himself to save Sonic, and Tails seemingly got turned into a cyborg or whatever, but there's no surprise, everything is predictable, and you when you have your final showdown with the Zeti... they just go *poof*, and then SURPRISE, Eggman was still alive and he's still a bad guy! And then you have to fight him in a battle that's just a rehash of the Nega Wisp Armor from Colors.

In Forces, there's all this build up to your showdown with Infinite, this new big villain that was hyped up in trailers, and he managed to defeat Sonic at the start of the game. You beat him in... a rehash of the fight you had with Metal Sonic earlier, and just like the Deadly Six, he just... disappears, for some reason. Then, SURPRISE it's time for Eggman's NEW mech! An... uglier, grey version of the Death Egg Robot. Wow. Surely the boss fight will be interesting, right? Well... Classic's phase is just a rehash of the Egg Dragoon fight the game had earlier on... the second phase with the Avatar was actually something new, and quite interesting, but then you get to the final boss, and surely it'll be something cool, right? No, it's just another rehash of the Nega Wisp Armor from Colors.... AGAIN.

Now, I don't really hold any grudge against Colors, but it really feels like Sonic Team completely ran out of ideas after that game and Generations. I really think those games were one-hit wonders, and Sonic Team has no idea what they're doing still.

 

I never said it wasn't official, I said it was a fake interview, because Shadow isn't a real person and can't answer questions about subjects he never discusses or appears to even encounter in the game. The members of Sonic Team writing the answers to these questions doesn't mean it's a canon source for Shadow's actual personality traits. As an example, they have him say that he hangs out with friends in his spare time. WHAT FRIENDS? Omega? Rouge? He isn't exactly portrayed as the type to socialize, even in SA2. The point is that these answers have no real bearing on the Shadow we see in the games. Also, this article was published in 2005, only 17 days prior to the release of Shadow The Hedgehog. He was already a boring edgelord when they made this, and the article was made to advertise Shadow The Hedgehog's imminent release.

Again, I'm not saying that your point about his character changing after SA2 was incorrect, I agree with that. I was just pointing out that the fake interview you referenced doesn't help your argument because it doesn't say anything about the personality we see in the games. The same can be said about the Twitter Takeovers.

 

I think it's how Sonic handles serious situations in Sonic Colors that's the issue. He tends to treat Eggman as a joke. And while in the past he is known to crack jokes at Eggman, (Sonic Adventure 1 Showed this) he never treated him and Eggman doing their usual thing again. He always knew Eggman would up the bar, and do more and more dangerous things. He knew that whatever the doctor had planned wasn't a joke, and that he needed to treat whatever he was doing as a serious threat, that needed to be stopped. Where as in Sonic Colors case. He just laughs at Eggman, and seems to think of him as a joke. And just thinks whatever he does is no big deal for him. That's how I see it at least.

 

If the cutoff point for "current Sonic is uninspired" is after Generations than I completely agree. I can't defend Lost World or Forces beyond the music and a small pool of good ideas, and they're both average games at best. It's the going back and dumping on Colors and Generations I can't agree with, which as said earlier would be like dumping on SA2 for everything wrong with 06.

What's odd is that these retroactive complaints have left Unleashed mostly unscathed, and that's propped up nowadays as "the last real Sonic game". Unleashed was the first main series game to have Sonic only, the boost gameplay, a generally lighter plot, no new "*name* the *species*" characters, and the beginning of a greater focus on Eggman as the primary villain. If Colors is criticized as being the source of today's problems, why does Unleashed get a pass despite Colors building off of it?

 

It's probably because Unleashed was the last mainline Sonic game with a AAA budget and a plot with higher stakes. Unleashed had some stuff the Adventure Era still had, such as Hub worlds, Human NPCs, mini game levels where you pilot the Tornado like in SA1, the story expanded on the lore of Sonic's world and the Chaos Emeralds, and it ended with a big epic battle with Super Sonic fighting a giant monster to save the world. It was also a game built around a story and theme (traveling the world to save a broken planet and have Sonic get rid of his Werehog form).

The game also just had more cinematic flare to it in general, with high production value pre-rendered cutscenes, and the game often used QTEs to ramp up the spectacle quite a bit too. Colors, Generations, and everything afterwards felt significantly smaller in scale in comparison. The newer games are lower in budget, scale, and are all around very conservative; they're very 'safe', if you will. Especially Forces, ironically enough. That game came out in 2017, but due to its poor art direction and lack of budget, the game's presentation just doesn't look quite as good as Unleashed in most aspects.

Look at the first cutscene in Unleashed, then compare it to the first cutscene of all the Sonic games that came after it. The difference is like night and day. No pun intended.

 

And this is exactly the thing - you don't see any difference between Adventure Sonic and Classic Sonic. Many of us do. So when you tell us that Sonic Colours gave us a completely different character from before, we think "yeah, he's been a different character since 1998".

This is how I see Classic Sonic:



And this is how I see Adventure Sonic:



Modern Sonic on the other hand reminds me of the Sonic seen in Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog.

But this is the thing: other people missed when the series wasn't goofy as shit. You cannot tell us that moving away from goofiness is pandering to people who aren't Sonic fans, because if anything, moving towards this goofiness in the first place was pandering to people who weren't Sonic fans.

 

Uh... I'm pretty sure Colors, Generations, Lost World, and Forces are all pretty goofy, though I guess for different reasons the Adventure/Dark ages games were goofy. Even Mania was pretty goofy compared to the original Genesis games (The Hard-boiled Heavies, the Super Sonic bosses, and Knuckles & Knuckles mode, for example).

Also I see Classic Sonic as Early Dragon Ball Goku, and see Adventure Sonic as DBZ Goku, while modern is DBS Goku. That might be because I play Sonic games with the Japanese voices where the "TOTALLY RADICAL" 90s/early 00s camp in Sonic's personality isn't really there, as Sonic acts more like a shounen anime hero instead. As I stated before, the localization of the series also changes how the character is presented in the perception of fans.

 

This is kind of funny because I was thinking the exact same thing about Sonic being like the Fonz. I don't see Adventure Sonic as terribly different, but I can understand why he seemed different to you guys. I just don't think, for example, that the "low-budget flights" quip and other-such dialogue from Adventure-era Sonic is somehow unfitting for classic Sonic, especially using the Fonzie comparison.

I don't get why Frostav is saying that goofiness and the characters apparently being dorks are the positives of the series, because that's not what I particularly associate Sonic games with, classic or Adventure. All the Sonic games contain goofy elements, and they're obviously fun adventures, but I wouldn't use "goofy as shit" to describe the ideal Sonic game. Referencing the classic games in particular, if you look at all the in game cutscenes in Sonic 2 and 3&K, they are all very dramatic. There's hardly an ounce of goof to be found, rather emphasizing an epic, cinematic feel. I will concede that the cutscenes in the Adventure games undoubtedly contain more goofery than those classic scenes, but I wouldn't say it's beyond the scope of cheesiness present in Sonic media of the early-mid '90s, such as the cartoons and comics. The games still balanced cheese with storytelling that was treated seriously from a dramatic standpoint, and most of the storytelling was still quite cinematic.

I think we just need to see Sonic Team take notes from the OVA. Not the English dub though, I mean the real one. Make Eggman a bit less 'cartoon villlain of the week'-esque and you have a classic-era tone with humor and seriousness perfectly balanced.

Yeah, Colors+ are goofy for all the wrong reasons. That's also one of the things I really didn't like about Mania actually. They put a lot of cute/goofy stuff into Mania that was absent from the actual classic games, such as Sonic's looking up animation having a corny expression of curiosity, when he originally retained his confident, serious and determined expression.

 

I don't see it. The Hard-Boiled Heavies don't look any goofier than the googly-eyed crab and caterpillar robots of the original game.

The later games had high stakes. In Colours Eggman was going to mind control everyone on the planet, in Generations he tore apart time and space, in Forces he conquered the world and became a fascist dictator.

You can argue about the tone, focus, dialogue, pacing, emotional weight and overall execution, but the stakes were as high as they ever were.

 

They act goofier than the Egg Robos from Sonic & Knuckles, is what I'm saying. They're very silly, and the final boss has Eggman and the Phantom King cartoonishly fighting over the Phantom Ruby in the background makes for a pretty silly final battle.

Then the execution, then. The newer games do a poor job at making the stakes feel high, and that's largely due to most of the characters not taking the situation seriously. The only exception to this was Infinite, and his whole subplot went no where, and the payoff to beating him with the 'power of friendship' is pretty anti-climatic. Then he just disappears, and we never find out what happens to him. You'd think the way he was hyped up, he'd have a bigger role, but nope. Sure, Eggman took over the world, but you never really see Eggman doing dictator things. You don't see him enslave anyone, or have statues of himself everywhere, or anything. Outside of a couple of levels, it barely feels like Eggman did anything to the world in Forces.