I feel the opposite on that matter regarding world, it's good that it is not set in stone with mobius and stuff, cause that would limit the creativity of the games, one game you can have a world full of humans and looking grounded enough like Unleashed. another game be like colors where it is more fantastical and alien, a third game can have Angel Island, and then you can go to other worlds like storybook games, you can then travel from Island to Island like Rush Adventure and so on. Sure the games are inconstant in quality and tone but i don't find the world to be a real problem as long as they are doing good with it and retain some familiar locations like Green Hill Zone and stuff -as much as that zone is overused those days- , it's not like Mario have some named world to my knowledge, and that allow any game to be set anywhere and do anything without it being tied to previous games, in fact the weaker games are those that are directly in the same world like New Super Mario Bros series. A better example is Zelda, sure games are set in "Hyrule", but they are so so different in tone and style they may as well be set in different universes, yet that don't affect the quality, in fact that's part of the charm of the series. Sure we have traumatic experiences with Boom stuff and the upcoming movie that all they do is fragment the image of the franchise, but i don't necessarily blame the world, but the overall direction of them.
I'm kinda glad they ditched the environmentalism, or at least toned it down. I prefer Sonic to be its own thing rather than a political narrative. I prefer the Adventure games anyway.
"Take care of the fucking planet" is a pretty dumb thing to make into a partisan issue. Mostly the problem was that it just made a weird contrast for Sonic and co. being part of a "nature vs. technology" theme when half the characters in the series have high-tech gadgets of some sort.
There's also the change in setting, too. Before, the games were set on isolated locations such as islands (or the Little Planet in Sonic CD's case) that Eggman would attack and before we knew it the series started taking place in industrial cities and whatnot as they started expanding on Sonic's world/Earth/whatever. The 'Nature vs. Tech' theme doesn't work as well in those settings. Only modern games I can think of that somewhat bring it back are Colors and Lost World; and again, those are set in isolated locations (Egg Planet Park for Colors, and the Lost Hex for Lost World).
Believe it or not, but the storybook series does a decent job telling a story beyond established canon plus very little padding and a good balance of silly and serious. It's interesting to see Sonic in familiar settings. It made him so much cooler.
Touching again on how Robotnik’s tech became sleek is par for the course, in terms of Sega’s abandonment of Sonic’s identity, just like the abandonment of environmentalism. There are all kinds of ways to represent technology, different styles... but apparently Sega didn’t have the focus or budget to invest in world building. Just run-of-the-mill techno crap. What was great about the old technology was that it had purpose. Robotnik would take his egg-o-matic and rig it up in some creative manner, which often suited the particular zone. As a kid it was fun to think about how he rigged up his ship, how would he out-do himself in the next zone? How did it mechanically operate? All these variants worked on my imagination, similar to the bad guys in Mega Man. Then you had the badniks, which were a metamorphosis of animals, same thing. But all that got scrapped and replaced with lazy garbagecan enemies, and generic tech. It’s not retro-future, cyberpunk, steampunk, biopunk... it has no personality. It’s honestly pathetic. So look at the movie, same thing. Play it safe, lack of investment, boiler plate. but wait? Did I hear someone say environmentalism is political? It really shouldn’t be. Having respect for the environment you depend on to exist should be universally understood. Robotnik literally tries to turn the planet into a machine, this is an analogue to how the planet came to be viewed during the industrial revolution. Before then the planet was literally referred to as a living thing. Often as a women. But then there was a shift in ideology and the planet came to be viewed as a large machine that could be controlled at mans will. Robotnik is, or at least was, the literal manifestation of modern mans hubris. The greedy power hungry industrialist. The series didn’t used to just seem better because of our nostalgia, it actually was better because it was built off of universal tropes everyone understands because they are innate, and we all live this duality. We are all part Sonic and part Robotnik, or at least we were, before being “Sonic” was considered “political”. I guess Robotnik has roboticized our brains... We are a clockwork orange in Clockwork Zone.
Just because the series evolved doesn’t mean they stopped caring about the art direction... it just changed. I’ve always had a soft spot for the gundam looking robots of SA2, personally.
To me, better than SA2's G.U.N. bots, were Sonic06's Eggman bots. That kind of design for Eggman's robots that could've remained, alongside the animal-looking ones or not. As someone said, the "Nature VS Tech" theme of the first games has been getting a bit lost over the years. So, the aesthetic side of characters and mobs alike could be accepted as ever-changing. Hence me being capable of accepting this rendition of Sonic & Eggman, and even wondering how other characters would look like...
What some might call “evolve”, others might call “devolve”. I am obviously making a subjective claim. Likewise, one could claim the initial design of Sonic, for this movie, was also an “evolution”, and not evidence of a lack or “caring”. Nonetheless, it can generally be accepted this evolution was not for the better, and perhaps there was not an adequate level of care or consideration given to the design. These decisions can be based on availability and allocation of resources. To reference the movie again, Sonic most likely looks like a man in a suit because this required less keyframe editing, and was therefore cheaper to produce. Clearly the result was poorly received. So turning back to the thematic direction the series has taken over the years, these concepts are vaguer. It was gradual, death by a thousand cuts. Whereas the series once had depth and considerable attention to worldbuilding, it now doesn’t go much beyond the surface. Example, Robotnik was high tech and polluting. Sonic also had some technology, but it was sparse. So the bi-plane was vintage, and a little sporty. Robotnik’s vehicles were generally metallic and grungy, but far more powerful. Both were emblematic of their respective opposition and the thematic content. The odds were against Sonic in the technology department, and he had to overcome that. Today, Tails is supposedly a technology genius who for all intents and purposes appears to match Robotnik. Can you honestly look at Tails plane and identify any distinction between it and something Robotnik might create? Not really… And this is just lazy. Sega doesn’t need to convey anything about the way things work in this context. Robotnik has a spaceship, well so does Sonic. Robotnik makes a big robot, well Tails has a remote control that turns it off. It’s just a cheap plot device. So the viewer can’t go any deeper than surface level, there is nothing mechanical to understand. Robotnik’s technology basically becomes tantamount to magic, again, another cheap plot device, easier to produce, no concern for continuity or world building. FFS, all his technology appears to run on clean technology, but not because Robotnik has turned a new leaf, but rather minimalism and slick surfaces are easier to produce and require less investment. To anyone who doesn’t understand what I’m talking about, watch a few of the older Studio Ghibli films. Not only will you realize how heavily Sonic borrowed from those, but you will see the depth of world building that went to them. The airships in particular are dripping with character. It’s not just chrome balls zipping about. Sega just kept cutting the fat, and turning over employees, until the entire series was neutered. To claim, “hey it just evolved” lacks any depth of understanding and just accepts the status-quo at face value. It makes me wonder why anyone would invest their time in “the new” Sonic over anything else, short of nostalgia. That’s fine, I suppose, if your aim is to just market to children 4-11, but it doesn’t create much worth investing in for an aging audience. There is nothing to invest yourself in when things are so superficial, and nostalgia eventually wears off when there is no depth of understanding.
Yeah, the current robot design sucks. Let's hope the next one is better. It's suprisingly simple: Eggman's supposed to have an IQ of 300, you're not expected to understand this crap. Instead, they're leaving room for interpretation, engaging the player's imagination and stuff. It makes more sense that way. However, the whole story loses its credibility if it doesn't contribute to some sort of lore.
Yeah, I don't like the current direction of the series either. Pretty much everything looks bland and the gameplay is watered down. I know Sonic was never a pinnacle of storytelling or anything, but the stories are so bare-bones now it makes you wonder why they even bothered to put one in there in the first place. You can tell that pretty much no one who works on the games (outside of the music department) really cares anymore. Sonic's just there to sell merchandise and milk nostalgia from the 90s and to a lesser extent, the early 00s to make a quick, easy buck. The movie is honestly just an extension of that current lack of care, to be honest. Take a somewhat popular video game mascot character, make him look 'realistic' to attract normies, and throw in Jim Carrey and some 90s references (Gangster's Paradise, anyone?) for easy nostalgia bucks, and call it a day.
I sometimes wonder why it is, that a completely original or unheard of story, can get a great animated film project... but Sonic didn’t. The opportunity lost to making a surreal, artistic rendition of his world and his speed, is tragic. Obviously I have my own biases, but it feels like someone could have taken the classic tenants of the Sonic series, and then made that into a CGI cinematic masterpiece. The series already has a baked in audience and some public awareness. I had said before, I think something like that claymation-y CGI Charlie-Brown-Movie-style would have been a good look for the Sonic universe. Then just manipulate the scale and speed for impressive visuals, and change the setting to vibrant colours and surreal locations. I envision heavy use of organic and synthetic fractal patterns, and crystal-like natural formations. Dare it have a compelling and cute story, and you would have an award winning film. Oh well, a guy can dream. Edit: oh haha, I didn’t even realize that what I’m describing is sort of like my avatar pic.
While we're speaking of evolution/devolution in Sonic... Something that has bugged me as far back as SA2 was how the robots were no longer based off of creatures anymore. In the 2D games there are very, very few enemy designs that aren't "an animal but robotic and mad", and while that is a simple concept, it's very distinct and lends itself well to spiffy designs, as well as making it obvious what they're based off of (that is, an angry robot animal has a flesh-and-blood good animal trapped inside it that needs saving). Since Heroes onwards Eggman has just had a lot of generic humanoid designs (even the Egg Pawns are still around with the same design from Heroes IIRC). While, yes, it makes more sense from a practical standpoint to have humanoid robots instead of animal ones, it still represents to me a loss in art direction, one that had already been accelerated by Sonic Adventure dropping the 2D games' bright and polygonal level art concepts.
Seems that the "leaked" movie design that recently turned up might be real after all. Someone spied it out on a billboard:
The movie is going to be garbage. Even if the original trailer had the improved Sonic design, it wouldn't have looked like a good film. Lots of people (not necessarily people here though) seem to think that a fixed Sonic design means that the film somehow now deserves our time and money. The filmmakers fucked up badly with the original Sonic design, and we should be grateful that they fixed it. Piss off.
I just don't understand why people think good design=good movie. Seing this dumpster fire getting any kind of goodwill is making me sad. Also, the design isn't even that good? I mean it's better than the monstrosity we originally got, but it sure as hell isn't good.
I'm sure that there's a term for that. They dropped the car so low to begin with that anything that's better than shit is confused for being good. Although based on the blurry pictures we have, I think Sonic looks fine now. He'd be better with brown arms and his cyclops eyes, but he's fine as is. For a live action film with a "realistic" Sonic, I don't think we could ask for that much more. However, we could always ask for a fully animated film...
I think that was the point of that first design. People rage, they change, people start liking. Mission Accomplished. See you all next year. ...even I don't see this movie doing any good. Dragon Ball Evolution says I, to begin with...
