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

I like cutesy. Not that the games should always be this way but I really like the aesthetic and look of Lost World. Nothing wrong with a whole game being lighthearted now and then imo. Most Sonic characters are cute to begin with.

In general I think the tone and aesthetic of the games should be portrayed seriously but certain things are just cute. Like in Mania Studiopolis and Mirage Saloon. The TV/Movie stuff, train/bar and the boss with with miniatures attacking you. That’s clearly all meant to be cute and fun.

It depends when the cutesy parts take place. You can still have a mostly serious storyline as some games have already done. I think an element of cuteness has always been part of the Sonic universe. The Flicky animals, chaos and other various things.

 

I don't really like when the games are too goofy like Colors, just like I don't like when they're too serious like Shadow. Why does it have to be one extreme or the other? A balance is most preferably IMO. I like my Sonic games to be like the MD games basically, playing their story straight while still having lots of cute or whimsical parts. That's what makes those games so charming for me. Some games have amped up the whimsiness (Chaotix) or the seriousness (SA2) while still being mostly acceptable, but it's when they go all out in either direction that it makes me cringe. I would say SA1 was the 3d game that struck the right balance.

 

I think people are able to enjoy what they enjoy. To me I think the classic Sonic games are some of the best video games ever made. I also admittedly enjoy Sonic R, 3D Blast, and the Game Gear games as guilty pleasures.

I never liked the Adventure games even though those only came out a few years after I had played the classic games.

I think we can all agree on the fact that whether you like arcade style games, or Sonic Adventure, that Sega rarely does a good job appealing to any of these styles.

Sonic Mania is one of my favorite games of all time and is exactly what I wanted in a Sonic game. I’m so thankful for this game and am so glad it came out. It plays perfectly and looks and sounds amazing.

That being said, as a 2D fan I can’t forget the announcement, release, and disapointment of Sonic The Hedgehog 4. Episode 2 did little to fix the complaints I had. Sonic Mania is the real Sonic 4 as far as I’m concerned.

I’m sure 3D fans must feel the same way about forces, unleashed, and Sonic 06.

When I was at the Sonic 25th Party (where the next Sonic game (Mania) was going to be revealed), I talked to a lot of people in line. To my surprise about half the people told me they wanted SA3, while the other half (myself included) wanted a classic Sonic game.

Sega clearly has huge fans of the classic games and of the early 2000s games. Why not only make games in these styles? Why do they have to try and reinvent the wheel each time?

Did anyone want a game like Colors, Secret Rings, Lost World, or Black Knight? I doubt it.

Sonic Mania was incredibly succesful in both sales and reviews and was a classic Sonic fan’s dream. Why aren’t we getting more after the Plus DLC? The outsiders that made Sonic Mania clearly know what they are doing, vs Sega which doesn’t know how to design Sonic games anymore.

They should have a 2D sonic line and a Sonic Adenture line of games that continually come out, this way everyone is happy.

 

Yes.

 

Colors is sublime, especially going back to it after all these years.

 

The noises in Shadow’s head can be a rather stressful affair, but the fight against the Biolizard makes up for that, IMO. Shadow can be a real badass once he’s gotten on top of his sudden snaps. He’s a worthy foe.

 

I personally loved Secret Rings. It’s one of my favorite Sonic games. Once it gets going it’s a really fun ride imo. Black Knight wasn’t as fun but I think the main quest being so short was part of that. I didn’t really do any of the side missions. I should replay it.

As for doing Classic and Adventure style games only. I’d be disappointed if they stuck to the same 2 formats forever. I like getting an assortment of games. Was Colors very different? Seems like a typical Sonic game to me. The Wisps were not a huge requirement.

 

Speaking of Secret Rings, it's so much better if you configure it to work with a traditional controller in Dolphin. It honestly makes me wonder why Sonic Team felt they needed to shove in motion controls when it was pretty clear they were unnecessary and unintuitive.

 

You seem to be under the impression that everyone prefers the Adventure formula to the boost formula and wants all Sonic games to play the same. I remember back when Sonic '06 was announced, a common complaint was that it looked too much like the Adventure games. I also remember Sonic Rush getting a lot of praise for moving the 2d formula forward. I say that as someone who could never get into Rush, and someone who welcomed Sonic '06's return to the series' 3d roots after Heroes and Shadow (of course, that was before I actually played it).

 

Playing the main stages in Secret Rings with a fully-upgraded Sonic is good fun, but the problem is that getting to that point isn't. The lengthy upgrade system and boring side mission hurt Secret Rings even more than the motion control, if you ask me.

I think Black Knight is a lot better in every way, although I've been thinking about something recently. Black Knight is one of the least "Sonic" games in the whole series. Other than the SA1/2 music and goal post sign, so many traditional Sonic elements are missing. No rings, springs, or dash panels outside of the Legacy missions, no Eggman (or a medieval counterpart, even), no loops beyond a single grind rail in Molten Mine, very linear level design overall. It makes me wonder if the game would've been better received as an original IP about some superpowered Mega Man-like robot knight. Come to think of it, it wouldn't be a bad fit for Rocket Knight.

 

Colors is very consistent, yes.

Unfortunately what it's consistent at is being a soulless, dispassionate, tedious slog so that's not really a good thing. Colors is Blandness personified. It has none of the cheesy edge of the Adventure saga, nor the masterful mechanics, level design, and pacing of the classics. 06 is bad, but Colors is the moment Sonic Team just stopped giving a shit entirely and phoned everything in. I mean, shit, at least 06, despite being an awful tedious conga line of bad decisions, had ideas (and introduced Silver, a character whose popularity I've noticed rising in recent years). Colors is just "yeah here's your mediocre Mario ripoff on the Wii, I guess". Also it introduced wisps which have been fucking up the series for over a decade at this point and won't go away.

Colors marks the point Sonic became nothing more than a passionless cash-grab of a series devoid of any charm its earlier entries had with nothing but disingenuous metahumor and pathetic "haha, we sure are dumb and stupid, huh?!" self-flagellation in its place. No more games like it, please.

 

"Amazing. Every word of what you just said... was wrong."

- Luke Skywalker

 

That's so wild to me. "Soulless" is the last word I would use for Colors when I think of its setting, scenery, and music.

 

Colors doesn't have ideas? Seven new gameplay mechanics, wildly creative environments, and expansive levels with true multiple routes is "soulless and passionless"? Regardless of how the Wisps are handled nowadays, they were the first time Sonic Team focused strictly on expanding Sonic's moves instead of just making alternate gameplay styles. Using the Wisps to access unique areas, sometimes going through multiple Wisps in a row to stay on the optimal path, is an excellent mechanic that recalls the Tails and Knuckles routes of 3&K. While 06 and Unleashed had some well-designed levels, Colors really capitalized on making the alternate paths lead to full-fledged different areas, that could then split up even further, instead of just being brief shortcuts. The environments are some of the best in the franchise, no stage in Colors has been "done before", there is nothing as simple as "ice world/fire world/jungle world", which certainly can't be said about 06's repurposing of SA1 environments like Wave Ocean, White Acropolis and Flame Core. The OST is also one of the best and most diverse, with elements of rock, jazz, funk, electronic, and more.

"We sure are dumb and stupid"? Where was any of that in Colors? Because Sonic makes some corny jokes? Well, I guess that means the entirety of 3D Sonic is in the same boat. Why is the game disingenuous, pathetic, and phoned-in because it takes a different tone? I grew up with SA1/2 primarily, and Colors was the first 3D Sonic since Heroes to give me the same joy as playing SA2 as a kid.

 

Colors is the moment where Sonic stopped being Sonic, as a character, to me at least. All the boost games control poorly too. Especially the 2D stuff, which makes up a lot of the gameplay in Colors.

That said, Frostav's post seems extremely hyperbolic.

 

I'm in the camp that just thinks Colors is okay at best. It's not what I'd personally want out of Sonic, and I felt the game was dragged out with the unnecessary 6 act structure- especially when a lot of those levels rehashed areas from previous acts. If anything, Colors is more of a puzzle platformer than a traditional Sonic game, and it feels notably slower and clunkier. Control-wise, it felt very unrefined, but overall it wasn't terrible. This game is probably one of the biggest mixed bags in the fandom right now for how much a departure it was compared to the games that came before it.

Then you have Lost World and Forces, which take the worst parts of Colors and amplifies those problems, rather than improving upon them. Overall, Sonic Team used Colors' and Generations' successes to stagnate the evolution of the series rather than using it to push things further. Even with Sonic Mania and the Sonic movie around, I can't bring myself to have faith in Sonic Team or whoever makes Sonic games now unless they start cranking out consistently good games, instead of consistently bland, mediocre ones that always fall short of the mark.

As I've stated before, I think Morio Kishimoto is a bad director for this series, and he should step down.

 

Look, what I mean here is that I'm an Adventure kid, and the tone of SA1 and SA2 are gone and in their place is just awful shit.

See, one of the things people like me like about SA2 (SA1 to a lesser extent) is that it took it's absolutely extremely silly plot of "a blue hedgehog gets kidnapped by the military because they think he's a black hedgehog motivated by the death of his sister-figure who's actually a secret experiment inspired by millennia-old temple paintings by a scientist who lived in a space colony" with such seriousness it became charming. There was an earnestness to it that's honestly rare these days. In all forms of media not just Sonic, for the record, for a long while this kind of completely unironic serious cheese in media just disappeared. Pop punk gave way to edgy nu-metal, goofy high school comedies gave way to dark and depressing realistic stories of the trials of life, 80's-style action movies finally died, etc.

Unleashed still had a good bit of this tone, but Colors is when it just disappeared and the awful late-2000's trend of insufferably irony set in. The plot was still there, because they couldn't just not have one, but everything became a dumb joke with no real narrative payoff or anything. Just "go defeat Eggman"--a plot I, for the record, would be totally fine with...if it weren't bogged down with a complete lack of seriousness. The genesis games had incredibly simple plots, yet, but they're not intentionally going "haha, look at how dumb and childish this all is!". There's a reason "Baldy McNosehair" is an infamous turn of phrase for the wrong reason. This entire attitude permeated Sonic (and still does) for like a fucking decade. The social media turned to literal self-flagellation solely to sell out to memelord youtubers (Egoraptor) who still shat on the series without end. Sonic was a joke by then, yes (any franchise that released Shadow the Hedgehog and Sonic 06 in a one-two-punch would have been), but Colors marks the moment Sonic internalized the joke. You know that dope ass intro in Sonic CD? Post-Colors Sonic would never do something that dope without ruining it with tons of jokes. See, my problem isn't that I'm a dumbass edgelord adventure kid who just likes stupid edgy anime nonsense (okay I kind of am) but the fact that they don't have the earnestness of the Adventure games OR the simplicity of the genesis games.

Do you remember the Deadly Six? No of course you don't, they completely suck ass and no one likes them. You know who people really do unironically like now? Silver, a character from the literal funeral pyre of the series' reputation and one of the most obnoxious characters in it, because he was in a game that didn't think itself to be a joke, even if it was a completely unintentional one. There was stuff about Silver fandom members could latch onto that people really did like.

And for the record I think 06 is absolute garbage and utterly devoid of any merit in almost every respect, so please don't call me some dumb Adventure kid who would defend even the literal nadir of the entire series and one of the most tragic nadirs of any video game franchise ever.

Gameplay wise Colors isn't faring much better. Every act is tiny. The levels are all segmented acts each completely focused around one (usually insipid) gimmick instead of big cohesive worlds that happened to have themed gimmicks like...every single game before Colors. The music is good, yes, but the wisps make sure you can't hear it for more than ten seconds anyway so yay I guess? Wisps also just fundamentally suck by design--I don't play Sonic to mess around with powerups that entirely change the gameplay. Powerups in the genesis games were defined by additions to Sonic's moveset (they didn't even add anything to anyone else!), like the shields or the speed shoes. In the 3D games, the movesets themselves were expanded. I just do not want to deal with the gameplay suddenly no longer being a platformer every ten seconds!

If the 3D games were slowly shedding the core elements of the classics for the worse, Colors is when they were finally excised out entirely, leaving a bunch of utterly insipid, boring, tedious levels defined solely by awful blocky platforming and which are like 90% 2D anyway so why the fuck wouldn't I literally just play Mania "Mania wasn't out then" okay fine then why wouldn't I just play 3&K. Colors sure as hell doesn't have any of its design elements in it! (if your response to this isn't "SA2 didn't either" 1. that's not an answer, that's whataboutism 2. maybe I think that they should have added those elements back in later not get rid of them entirely)

I guess the graphics are pretty. I'm not a fan of how cartoony the art-style is, though. I would have much preferred the surrealism of the genesis games in 3D than what we got.

The only reason Colors has a good reputation was because it actively excised every bit of its Sonic heritage and thus got people who don't like Sonic to enjoy it because it's really just a mediocre Mario game in the end.

Colors is the Sonic Game For People Who Don't Like Sonic Games.

Colors is the reason Sonic Generations is the last game in this series I have bought not counting Mania. As long as it provides the template for 3D Sonic, I have no interest in 3D Sonic. I got my fill of boost with Generations. I have zero interest in the shambling zombie-esque travesty of my childhood that the series is now.

 

Why does Colors having a lighter tone mean that it's nothing more than ironic mockery? What was insufferably ironic about Sonic facing the prospect of having to fight brainwashed Tails, Sonic discovering the Wisps kept captive in Asteroid Coaster, and Sonic pushing Tails into the space elevator for his safety when things get hairy towards the end? Was the grand finale of Sonic running down the elevator structure as a black hole rips it apart not dope enough compared to the CD intro? Or combining the energy of the freed Wisps into one and blasting it right into Eggman's machine? I understand the bad jokes being an issue, I certainly wasn't on the floor laughing when I played Colors, that's for sure. I just don't get how Colors is such an outrageous change tone-wise from Unleashed.

From a gameplay standpoint, I can understand the shorter gimmick-focused acts being less fun (I'm not a huge fan), but there are larger, more intricate acts in every zone. I can also understand the Wisps being too different, and some (Laser, Drill, Frenzy) are better than others, but they hardly break up the overall pace, and the variety introduced by moving through different routes with them is fun. Rarely are you ever forced to use the same Wisp repeatedly for a single act either.

"Actively excised every bit of its Sonic heritage" is incredibly hyperbolic. All the classic badniks, several level-specific gimmicks (Sweet Mountain lollipop swings, Starlight Carnival energy roads and crushers, Asteroid Coaster... coasters), and the fact that the environments do the Genesis surrealism more than any other 3D Sonic except Heroes. How is a space resort and a Japanese underwater palace not in that style? You'd like people to not refer to you as a "dumb Adventure kid", but Colors is for People Who Don't Like Sonic Games? I think I like Sonic games, I've played and cleared nearly all of them and have had fun with nearly all of them as well, and Colors remains a favorite. Of course, it doesn't have to be for you, but why imply that it's not real Sonic? How is that any different from Genesis-only purists who would dump on the Adventure games in the same way?

 

Nah, you see, it's OK when he does it...

For real, though, it's not worth it. He flipped out on me for not calling SA2 "an 11/10 masterpiece" when I was talking to someone else.