I was under the impression the early Robotnik design was a misinterpretation of the original sprites. It's not obvious he's wearing dark glasses. In fact I'm not convinced they really had a solid idea of what he should look like until the whole DiC/AoStH/SatAM thing.
I can't really see this issue in SA1 for the most part (if the auto-run section in the middle of speed highway counts, then I agree on that one), but I can clearly see the "americanization" issue when they decided to put Rob Zombie's Dragula in the US release of Jet Set Radio, which I like but not at all in that game, as it's totally out of place in such a "good vibes" game.
I had a hard time following that interview. It clearly seems like the vocal demos would be MJ's original demos, but they are constantly referring to Sonic 2? I've always thought a reason why MJ's tracks may have been dropped from S3 was that they simply sounded awful when compressed down to the Genesis sound chip. His music is very rhythmic, percussive, and has tons of of vocal embellishments (e.g. "c'mon"). That's very different than the non-MJ tracks in S1,2,3&K which are catchy, melodic, and cartoonish.
They're not talking about MJ. Yamaguchi is trying to tell about how SOA wanted to use its own in-house music for Sonic 2 but it was awful. Ohshima is confused and keeps bringing up MJ but Yamaguchi says this is something different from MJ.
o_O that's electronic, Kumatani's even the one credited for it as opposed to Senoue re: americanization in SA1, I disagree with the theory that it was pushed for that purpose, at all. Senoue did work on Sonic 3 & Knuckles, and the tracks that he's credited on (or even ones you can guess at, like the glowing spheres/pachinko bonus stage) have his style. He worked on Sonic 3D Blast Genesis too, so he wasn't Some Dude they brought in to appeal to westerners - he already worked on Sonic games prior. Also, I think the view of SA1's soundtrack overall is reductive - SA1 had a variety of musical styles and it had three or four composers. It's SA2 where the style was more homogenized but even then that entire game was a vibe swap. And the last game to really lean into that style was Shadow, which was basically an SA2 sequel.
Sonic 2's soundtrack has a lot of rock/funk/grunge/jazz etc. SA1 stays very close to that for basically the entire soundtrack.
wait, you can put guitar riffs on the Genesis? someone should've told MJ that and the non-genesis games prior (3D Blast Saturn and Sonic R) had electronic OSTs written by a western artist, with R's being infamously "eurotrash" - and they were both by western devs to boot. It doesn't line up at all.
Further, our own development article on SA1 says: The entire localization process revolved around polish and translation, not "americanizing" things - and even then the OST wasn't changed at all either (don't forget that SA1 came out in Japan first). "appealing to westerners" wasn't even on their radar, and the game was highly anticipated and praised in Japan. The entire "Sonic Adventure was made/changed/whatever for westerners" thesis makes no sense.
I do tire of the bashing Sonic Adventure receives in the Western part of the world by people who refuse to let go of the American cannon. It's old and this wouldn't even be a thing if they stuck with the Japanese cannon in the West during the Mega Drive era. I'm surprised someone would imply the opposite here with Sonic Adventure that it's Americanized because of rock style music. Um, yeah. Whatever.
It's pretty obvious to me there's quite of bit that on the Genesis. What is the "Eternal Champions' Main Theme" (1993) or the type of music of that is in "After Burner II" (1990)? Some examples of both the West and the East respectively doing rock style music.
I mean think about it from another perspective; if you were raised to believe Sonic was in fact a freedom fighter who shacking up with a Princess, only to effectively be told "Nope, doesn't matter, fuck you" would you just accept that? No, you'd be pissed the hell off. Nobody likes being told that their preferences were effectively wrong. It is what it is at the end of the day, but that was always going to be a controversial decision in the series no matter what.
To be fair, none of that was ever in the games so it's not a "controversial decision" to make that not part of the games going forward.
It is what it is, but after 20 out of the 30 years of this series being this + more than enough time and means for people to figure out what the true intentions of the series and it’s creators was, I can’t see why anyone should keep their patience with people still hung up on it, let alone backpedal their own thoughts and make room for it in an age far over it. Besides, if Sega really wanted things from those canons they would’ve already done it. In fact, they already did (Robotnik, chilidogs, arguably the two worlds / separate anthro planet deal). If that can’t satisfy the people who still feel something missing, then it’s time for them to move on. Yeah, I find it wild that people are relating rock music to "Americanization". I hope people do know that Japan had just as much of a rock scene as America did? And it goes back as early as the 1960s. Sonic Adventure in particular seems to take a lot of vibes from not only the hard rock scene there, but the jazz fusion scene too. If anything, you could argue the rock soundtrack was an attempt to make Sonic more catered to Japanese audiences than the America-centric pop sensibilities the classics aimed for. I mean shit, rock is still alive over there, while it's dead in the west. Thinking Japan doesn't like rock is wild.
Sonic was more than just the games in that time period. Kids did in fact watch television in that time
It literally didn’t matter as much as you’re making it out to be. If it did, the public would still be talking about it to the same extent as the games, when in reality it’s only a small sect of diehards and maybe the long-departed old fan that truly feel like somethings missing without them.
Because the television shows have been off the air for literally two decades? And have had no official releases outside of Youtube videos on the Internet. Of course nobody is going to talk about something that hasn't been relevant since it stopped airing. This is especially if you compare that the 2D titles are constantly getting re-released every couple of years, so of course they're going to stay in the public consciousness longer. But none of the that changes the fact that the television shows were just as, if not bigger than the games in getting people aware of Sonic at the time of their release. Cuz if you didn't have a Genesis, you had no way of playing a Sonic game, but everyone and their Mom had access to a TV. It's not really rocket science to assume that the television shows played a part in getting Sonic on the map.
I really don't think the shows deserve anywhere near that amount of credit for getting anyone into the series, it was moreso for those that were already fans. Especially if you compare it to the insanely positive word of mouth generated by the games and subsequently printed in like every gaming magazine, the hilarious and ambitious ad campaigns, and of course the fact that that the first two titles were console pack-ins. I don't believe the shows made any significant contribution, if they even did at all.
