There could have been plans for it that got ditched in favor of the IGN reveal. I wouldn’t want to attribute bad faith since I don’t really know the guy, but I’m guessing he has a history of it from these comments.
I don't recall the specifics, but I remember a similar thing last year. Either way, we have a few weeks left from IGN so it's not like we'll be left without more of whatever else they have to show.
I'm pretty jazzed about this, actually. I've been surprised at how nostalgic I am for SA2's plot lately. It had some drama and a real gravity to it. Not gravity in the "Gerald Robotnik ISIS execution video" way, but in how there are these discrete timestamped events shown from two opposing perspectives. The "where" and "when" matters, the stakes are high, it's full of direct conflict and everyone gets their own climatic showdown. Nukes go off, characters die, Tails is getting manhunted across the globe- I convinced myself it was cringe, but it's actually pretty cool?!
The SA game plots are dope as shit and I'll take no one saying less. The people just weren't ready. It's also a weird thing where for the longest time people have acted like it was such a serious dramatized turn for the franchise when in reality.. these games were really silly? Like loads of camp and cornball stuff happening at all times. It was very lovable. Even if it took it's dark-ass turns it remained still in the scope of "high octane action adventure story starring light hearted anime protags and villains", which is kind of the ideal for me on Sonic.
I wonder if Retro's oldbies and mods, the ones slamming the dark and dystopian plotlines 15 years ago, are having a mental breakdown as they realize fans who grew up with them unironically love them even as they get to be as old as they were back then. It's gotta be surreal for some of you.
Same tbh, and I honestly was super intrigued by Sonic 06's attempt to make the plots a little bit more serial and less self-contained. I'm all for us getting a Sonic that takes itself a little more seriously, I think the key is just finding that "just right area" between Sonic kissing a human woman and literally dying VS goofy Mario enemies and baldy mcnosehair-type writing.
I kinda liked what Sonic Unleashed did, managing to be both "fun", "funny" and "serious / dark". I hope Frontiers will manage to do something close to that. And I'm very glad that the Chaos Emeralds will be relevant to the plot again.
Adventure and Adventure 2 is not that far removed from the intended vision on the Japanese side or from what was being pushed by SatAM. Adventure just finally had the guts to start going all out on it, almost in a "this is the movie for the anime" kinda way, but they (mostly) didn't stop until 2010. I think the closest they got to recreating the direction the original games took after adventure was maybe Unleashed, which did implement some element of slapstick, while it was still very cinematic, it was also much more cohesive in the direction it took, not overindulging on the "cool" parts. To fold that thought back to Frontiers: there's something very tragic-feeling about the islands and the enemies we've seen so far, which goes back to the Echidna stuff done in Adventure, but I think it's going to be somewhat elevated here. There's got to be some fairly dark twist somewhere.
We love the plots too now. The Adventure games did a lot of things right. A lot of pearl clutching was done over the shift in tone because it was just another perversion of the franchise's identity, but the shonen anime turn was honestly the right choice for the era. We all got big into anime shortly after that. The whole Cannon's Core arc in particular was pretty masterfully done, I thought. The game throws you into this grueling gauntlet where you're swimming through sewage and hitting timed switches before spitting you out into this occult temple in the last place you expected to find one. It's disquieting. The Biolizard reveal is a real shock and a horrifying turn of events. You're at your lowest point, and then Shadow struts in, and your pressure is relieved. This chintzy Evil Sonic we spent the whole game looking down on rescues you, the player, in an act of genuine heroism that transcends the plot on account of how emotionally exhausted you are. Supporting Me is ice cold, cool as shit. It all came together in this really memorable moment. I've never seen it mentioned, is it generally known that the whole arc was just a rote retelling of the final act of Burning Rangers? Even the swimming segments are eerily similar. The whole game is this missing link between the Saturn and Dreamcast era.
I’m glad u made the SATAM connection because I was thinking the same thing. If Flynn was put in the driver’s seat for Frontiers than I’m not worried about the story. At Archie, Flynn did a great job continuing SATAM’s legacy while incorporating elements from the games. Frontiers’ may be darker than Sonic Colors but I doubt it will be tasteless like Shadow the Hedgehog. If Flynn is just localizing a Sonic Team penned plot however... well I’m not as hopeful
I'm worried about Flynn not because of the darker direction, but simply that he's not good at writing stories. He's great at writing scripts, character interactions...but his stories, from his first years at Archie all the way to now at IDW, have been overly long and messy. He's the Tetsuya Nomura of western comics. He starts with a good idea, then has no idea where he's going to take it and no idea how to end it, and it drags on and on and on. That being said, this is a self-contained story (hopefully), so maybe things will be different.
He's pretty good at self contained stories, and considering character interactions are the most a writer could really contribute to a Sonic game in the first place, I'd say he's a pretty good pick. He's doing great with that and the lore so far. For the first time in a long time, the continuity is worth caring about again. Pretty neat!
aye I hear you. I came to this realisation a while back when we got Mania, the game I had been waiting years for, then they still managed to mess it up for me with reusing most of the level art (no blame for taxman or stealth on that, they did a fantastic job with what sega would let them). I'm now at the point where I don't have ANY expectations about a new Sonic game, I just observe the reactions and watch from the sidelines. Occasionally chip in with a moany comment. I have no emotion attached to the franchise anymore, and that's a good thing. When you get to that point of not caring whether Sonic Team actually pull their finger out, It's actually really freeing. I'm much more invested in the Zelda franchise these days and looking forward to botw2.
As someone who falls out of this designation since I wasn't a mod at the time, I think we should avoid painting with a wide brush aimed at oldbies and mods. What point does it serve? Plenty of other members had their preferences for games before the "dark era" at the time too.
haha I missed this comment, pretty funny. I'll bite. I'm an oldie, and yeah, I don't hate games like Shadow, 06, Black Knight because of their insincere 'dark' storylines, that have been pulled off much better by other franchises. I hate them because they are piss poor games that ruined the Sonic franchise which has taken a decade for it to partially recover from. You are free to enjoy them as you wish. No mental breakdown here, I just wish you guys got better Sonic games.
Yeah, I mean oldbies and mods alike just collectively decried The Bird Man for having an opinion like the one Dubs described, so I don't think most of us are "having a mental breakdown". A lot of folks can recognize elitism when it occurs and actively resist the practice. I can see how this community in particular gets a bad rep for that though, since there have been folks in the past who were a bit like that, and I mean... the site is called "Sonic Retro" lol. I grew up with the classics tho and tbh, while I still prefer them slightly more, I love a lot of what the Adventure and modern games have done (or tried to do, lol)... especially in terms of Story.
I grew up in the 2000s, so "dark" Sonic should be for me (that's dark storytelling, not the user Dark Sonic (although I've seen your pics, you're pretty cute)), but evidently, it isn't. It's not that I think Sonic should never touch any mature material ever, it's that it should stick to what it knows, and most of the games don't know how to do dark stories. My problem with "dark" stories is that Sonic is bad at them. If it were good at them, I wouldn't care nearly as much. Hell, my favorite TV show of all time is about cartoon animals dealing with really dire adult problems. In almost anything it does, all a Sonic story needs to be is well-executed. The problem with Shadow the game isn't guns and swears. It's that the game is juvenile in it's presentation, it has characters exclaim and emphasize minor swear words like a child who just learned them. It parades guns around like they just discovered that shooting things in a game could be cool. And the price for all this masterful narrative work? Shadow's entire character. Now he's apparently conflicted about whether he should indiscriminately murder people. He just believes anyone who tells him they know his past, and spends most of his time either confused or sulking. This is separated into 10 non-canon endings that go nowhere, only for Shadow to come to the exact same conclusion he did in SA2. But he's all the game's about! The villains are generic, and every other character is just here to display their 3 traits and fuck off. The problem with 06 isn't that it's dark. It's less dark than SA2, by any measure. It's that it has absolutely nothing to say. Princess Elise is the emotional core of the plot, and the extent of her internal conflict is "I have to not let the world die but I like Sonic", while Sonic himself is blander than he's ever been. Silver asks whether it's okay to kill someone to save the world, but then he never comes up with an answer, and doesn't have to because killing Sonic wouldn't even work anyway. Shadow gets a good line about fate or whatever, but it hardly counts as a theme. Black Knight...is okay. Still a little dumb in that it basically has nothing to do with the rest of the series, but it's kind of a character study on Sonic himself, and it does a decent enough job. Not sure I'd even call it dark. The point in all this isn't that you need a story to hold a tone one way or another (within reason), it's just that you need to do it well. Flynn himself is about as good as I could ask for. His comics were a pretty great balance between the lighter and darker tones, but most importantly, they put the strength of the storytelling first. That's all you need. I don't want to deify the guy, since I have my criticisms of his work, but compared to almost every other person to ever write a Sonic game, he's a breath of fresh air (or, well, he's going to be if his comics are anything to judge by).
