Unpopular Sonic Opinions

This is starting to go off-topic, but I'd be careful with that statement. The fact that so little information has been revealed before release and that they're not considering a physical release raises several red flags.

 

I think the story told in subtext throughout the levels in Sonic Colors is great. Planet Wisp is an obvious example of this, with it's serene, yet somewhat haunting music with the natural, beautiful looking planet being taken over by all of Eggman's work. In general I think Sonic Colors might have the best themes and overall stage atmosphere out of any of the 3d Sonic games. I think the actual cutscenes are pretty bad tho. Nothing actually important to the story happens in them. The story is actually better imo if you just skip the cutscenes lmao.

 

Contrary to popular belief, I can actually understand this logic. On the surface level, Sonic Colors does actually use many concepts found in the orginal games. The environmental themes present throughout, particularly on Planet Wisp.

I don't think it's executed particularly well, especially in the cinematography department. I think that's why it's such a divisive game; beyond the usual divide in Sonic opinions, Colors tells its story in such a boring way that it's hard to appreciate the things it does do right.

 

I do wonder what a new fan would think of Sonic's aesthetic identity. I imagine it must be baffling because of how disparate the series' identity is today. I think the 2D and 3D split is probably the easiest to understood. Fundamental and easy to grasp gameplay difference. But tonally the franchise is all over the place at the moment. You have the dark, brooding, melancholic Frontiers, the retro sunny Superstars, the similarly toned Dream Team. Not to mention the re releases of Generations and Origins. I would find it interesting to know what someone without our cultural legacy knowledge would think of the series' multi faceted identity.

 

For what it's worth, I remember seeing a very confused dad on Reddit a while ago who had picked up Frontiers because his ~6 or 7 year old son had loved Origins and Colors Ultimate, but was immediately put off by how melancholy and generally "un-Sonic" Frontiers was. Even for the newest fans, it can come down to how much something plays to or goes against their expectations.

 

From what I've seen, most people either dont care because it's not that unique to Sonic, or just think its weird but funny.

 

Ok, but how did the kid feel, the one that was actually going to be playing the game?

EDIT: Wait, was the kid put off or the Dad?

 

I played the games in a weird order (SADX > SADX Game Gear games > Heroes > SA2 > Mega Collection > everything after that in release order) but I never got tonal whiplash between the early 2000’s games and the Mega Drive games. Sure SA2 was definitely more melodramatic than SA1 and Heroes but it felt like the same continuity, same world, etc and nothing struck me as odd. Playing Sonic 1 didn’t feel jarring to me either, I guess my brain was kind of like “this is an old game, this is how old games are”; just because I played SA2 before didn’t mean I expected GUN to show up and shoot Maria in Sonic 1. S3&K felt very connected to SA1 because the first level is literally called “Angel Island”, the whole island depicted in some cutscenes looked pretty similar to the CG one in SA1, and it felt like an epic backstory to SA1 where you get to explore all these cool areas of Angel Island.

If anything Colors made me feel tonal whiplash due to Sonic’s sudden personality change to a Saturday morning cartoon character & the prominence of Orbot & Cubot, but what was even more of a shock was Lost World’s aesthetics looking so blatantly Mario and very un-Sonic. I know some people may prefer that aesthetic anyway since it may match their perception of the Mega Drive games and that’s totally fine, but since this is the unpopular opinions thread I’m just expressing my unpopular opinion.

 

No, SA2 was totally not a "natural evolution" of the Mega Drive games. Shiro Maekawa has been literally quoted saying that he disliked the 16-bit games, and therefore wrote SA2 to be as different from them as possible.

And even if this tonal whiplash that I totally experienced is nothing more than me being fooled by "misleading western marketing" and "hardware limitations", then I guess that I genuinely hate this franchise and prefer my delusions.

 

I feel like I should mention, just for the record, that I never got tonal whiplash from the darker Sonic games and stories,¹ but Colors did make me raise an eyebrow a little. The reason is simple: I grew up on Sonic 1 (MS), Sonic SatAM and Sonic CD (US), all of which are uh, pretty bleak when they want to be. In particular, the map in Sonic 1, putting Labyrinth just under Scrap Brain, always made me picture the former as some sort of sewer system for the latter, and the entirety of the game is about Sonic trying to reach Robotnik's base not only as fast but also as secretively as possible because a head-on fight would never be possible. Certainly SatAM had its influence on this interpretation.

So this idea of Sonic as this brazen guy who just says "yeah ok whatever let's just smash robots until we reach Eggman who by the way sucks lmao" never really stuck with me? Confident, sure, but I had never ever taken Sonic to be a hero who faces problems head-on and nothing else. And that's what he is in Colors, but perhaps not so much in previous games. He does escape a prison in SA2 after all.

Anyway the unpopular opinion to be stated here is that I've always seen Sonic as a super independent solo limited special operations kind of guy, not an anti-army hero.

¹ In Shadow, for example, the fact that Shadow uses guns and vehicles weirded me out infinitely less than the fact that the villain is an organic alien lifeform. Basically the same thing happened in SA2, which is a weird game to me all around -- perhaps not in tone, exactly, but in themes and universe.

EDIT: Hell, even in AoStH Sonic is no stranger to subterfuge. So yeah, Colors kinda strikes me as weird not exactly because it's lighter in tone, but because there's nothing of the kind there.

 

If you go from S1 straight to SA2, yeah that would be very jarring. But I don’t think going from S1 > S2 > S3&K > SA1 > SA2 with no side media influence would be all that jarring.

But going from “hey this is Sonic, his enemy is Robotnik, he lives on the anthros-only planet Mobius ok?” S1 > S2 > S3&K > “jk we lied to you, it’s Eggman not Robotnik, it’s Earth not Mobius, other humans exist, deal with it” SA1 > “oh and here’s the military and edgy dark Sonic” SA2, yeah I can see how that would piss some people off, and justifiably so. I’m not sure what the solution would have been though; they shouldn’t have had such different continuities between markets in the first place. I don’t think reworking SA1 to fit the western continuity (for example, replace all NPCs with anthros, make the environments look less realistic, etc) would have been a viable solution because it would have set an expectation that that’s what they do for every game from now on, and the devs probably didn’t even know about the completely different western canon at the time, they were just making a 3D Sonic game using story elements from S3&K as a base.

 

I never felt the shift from Sonic 1-SA2 was jarring either from my own experience. Although I do remember playing Green Hill in SA2 and thinking the series had changed a lot. I think playing Green Hill in SA2 drives how much the series had changed.

The thing I found most jarring was SA1 to SA2 in the respect that the stories of both games are very loosely connected. I always found that very strange as a kid because I'd only watched films or TV that had very direct follow up sequels.

 

Who are you quoting here? The only person who said "natural" was @Blue Blood who specifically said it to refer to 1-SA1 and then said SA2 shifted gears. As for the Maekawa quote, I think even most people outside of Retro and their moms know this by now, so I think everyone here's comments are made with the understanding of that. Despite Maekawa's influence, the transition from SA1 to SA2 stills feels like the same universe to me, and I think most people familiar with the JP versions of the games will find 3K to SA1 a natural progression as well (for the plot and visual design at least - the voices and cutscenes may throw some people for a loop).

 

I never found Sonic X too immature, or Sonic Colours terrible. I get a few chuckles from Colours and that is totally fine with me.

As a teen I was averted to any “kiddiness” to my entertainment (at that age we want to get away from being branded a kid), as a 35 year old creative type, I appreciate the amount of effort and the result.

My main gripe with colours, as with most games, is music interruption. Level themes are gorgeous, wisp themes are not. Gimme an option to turn that off and it’ll be perfect!

 

As a teen, at the time, SA2 seemed like an amazing upgrade to the franchise's storytelling and progression.
But little did I know of the overall franchise at that time, reinforcing my teen delight at SA2
Nowadays, I feel closer to SA1 than SA2, and I notice how the franchise changed from SA2 onwards...

 

I'm a huge SA2 simp but I can see why anyone would think it doesn't feel like Sonic anymore or that they went too far with its direction. I don't agree, but I can understand the arguments. I personally thought it was a mindblowing game in the same way Sonic 1 must have been when it first came out.

Part of that might be nostalgia but I played the classics and SA2 side by side as a kid so big shrug. To me they were both cool.

 

I think SA2's story is fine in a vacuum and isn't too jarring a jump from SA1. (I don't think it's surprising they wanted to go in a more serious direction after SA1 introduced more involved storytelling to the series.) The issue, for me, lies more in the fact that subsequent games (namely Shadow and 06) doubled down on the questionable decisions SA2 made in terms of tone and character writing to the point that the series' storytelling devolved into total farce and began to impact the quality of the games themselves. If I had to pick, I'd probably choose the writing of the Pontaff games over the Maekawa ones.

 

I think everyone's looking at this wrong. In the grand scheme of it all, SA2 still fits within the themes of the classic games, and maybe even a little bit of the meta era games. Quite literally the first cutscene is Sonic making jokes about in flight movies and snacks and then snowboarding down city streets. When he gets recaptured by the police he's saved by Amy who's dancing around asking him to marry her. It's a game where the drama and tone builds up over the course of the game, and mostly only revolves around what's Shadow's doing. Shadow's character is dark, that's the point, SA2 is not dark. Even Colors and Lost World tries to have stakes with Tails being captured and mind controlled, but fails on it, SA2 has Eggman blowing up the moon which are stakes that are acted on, but it's not that dark when you realize that no one was on the moon, no parts of the moon fell to Earth, and no one was hurt. SA2 is just scaling up the threat which is what Sonic games have been doing from the start, going from Eggman wanting to take over South Island, to taking over Westside with the Death Egg, to Angel Island and the Death Egg with the extra power of the Master Emerald, to Station Square with Chaos. And SA2 does the natural thing of Eggmain aiming to take over the world with the ARK's Eclipse Cannon.

 

I'd argue the Death Egg was always in of itself a way to take over/destroy the world. It's never made exactly clear in the Genesis games what Eggman intended to do with it but I like to think it's supposed to be a sort of "new Earth", made exactly how Eggman likes it and conveniently separated so he can do whatever he wants to the real thing. This might've even been the case in that prototype S2 concept map where most of the island is shown as completely uninhabitable by the time the Neo Death Egg is finished.