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

You are making a mistake of thinking I'm advocating for that
I state at the beginning I'm not.

Why shouldn't they be assholes? If the people before them, were assholes, and it worked. Why should they be assholes? The answer to the thread lies in the answer to the question. Why did they learn nothing from those who came before, because it worked. I'm not advocating for their behavior, in fact I think their existence is a failure on sega's part. The people before them too. However a bunch of people in this thread, seem to be complaining about the people , why are the people doing the behavior. The behavior got positive reinforcement. And the behavior benefits the company who holds the IP

You all are not asking the right questions, nor are you complaining about the right people.

Maybe you should read next time.

If you want someone to change their behavior, and you don't have any sort of power over them. You have to explain why they shouldn't do the behavior. I can't explain why not. Me personally I think its a shitty thing to do. Clearly they don't care about that , they care about results. And sega rewarded the behavior before. And that's the core issue here.

The thread's title in that sense is actually kind of misleading it should say

" How the younger fandom, learned from us that if you act like assholes to the younger fandom sega will reward you and make fun of the stuff they like and put in the stuff you like" . Because the behavior was rewarded.

No, while I do not think that " youtubers " are the downfall of sonic. A myriad of awful business decisions over the course of several decades did that.

However, I do think youtubers in general due to the nature of discussion on the internet has sort of tainted video game discussion in general. Which certainly makes it harder for sonic to get a leg up

 

I should be more clear:

The crux of your argument sucks. Flat out.

The people working under Sega who made content mocking the content of Sonic games from 2000-2009 were not the same people who made Sonic Mania and Sonic Mania Adventures or even the same people putting Classic Sonic and relevant iconography in Generations and Forces. They may have made or had a hand in making classic Sonic merch that helped boost the profitability of revitalizing 90s Sonic, but the distinction between them is important, because everyone who worked on Mania and Mania Adventures was there because they explicitly considered a qualified person or part of a qualified team for game development or animation. The people working Sonic's social media image and merchandizing were hired because they understood whatever marketing and branding trends were powerful and profitable, and today that basically means acknowledging or creating memetic material. They weren't brought on because they're assholes and Sega rewards that(???).

 

Ok maybe I misspoke because its seems as though you misinterpreted everything I said, or missed the point. So let start this off here
I agree with you, I agree with everything you said. All of it. Not only do I agree, I would argue the people who made the mocking content like the adventure era like ruby eclipse.

What I am talking about , is the general shift the franchise made was to appeal to what sega thought was a wider audience. There were a lot of people, youtubers, reviewers but in particular gatekeepy shitlords who gate keep-ed and got what they wanted. The removal of the content they didn't like and content catering to them. Sega thought that this group of people would be more lucrative and better for sonic's image if they were catered to, so they did. Effectively rewarding them for that behavior. " This is good your sonic is valid, their sonic is not and elements of it shall be removed and changed to cater to you. And we will make fun of them with you" . And younger fans saw this and when they grew up replicated it because the behavior was rewarded

I am not making any statement suggesting that someone working at sega is a secret sonic hater. The only people at sega who hate sonic is the people who handle the budgeting. Badum tish

 

Back on the subject on how humans should look in Sonic, I think the way humans look in the pre-rendered cutscenes in NiGHTS on the Wii fits pretty well. They're basically higher-poly Adventure-era humans.

 

Hmm, I don't think I agree. They're better than the 06 people by far, but if I had to pick a style, I'd go with Unleashed. I use Eggman as a comparison point, and the Unleashed people share design traits with him. Characters like the ice cream and hot dog vendors with their bulbous shapes, and Professor Pickle with his huge eyebrows. Characters that look believably human, but still cartoonish enough to stand out. Characters that (like Eggman), proportionally couldn't exist in real life, their body shapes and features are just too big and goofy. That's what I'd say works best.

 

Unleashed humans don't really fit with Sonic, imo, mainly because they look like a totally different art style from Uekawa's character designs. They could maybe fit with the Classic Sonic style, but not the modern style. Modern Sonic has always come off as more 'anime' to me, and I've never seen it as a Disney/Pixar cartoon. I feel like Sonic X got the look of the humans right, at least for the modern/adventure style.

 

I'm not overly fond of the Unleashed-style humans and I do prefer the Adventure NPCs overall, but to play devil's advocate, I do think the tone goes some way to making them feel like they fit. For me it's less a case of them clashing stylistically and more of a subjective aesthetic preference - I just think they look a bit, as you say, Disney/Pixar-ish.

 

This. SA1 and Sonic X felt more in line with the modern style to me.

However, like I said earlier in this thread, I feel the way of making the humans a perfect match for the Sonic characters' modern designs is using Uekawa's style:

Spoiler

 

Okay, preface what I'm about to say with, I love Uekawa's designs... Sonic in-game design is really garbage. Like, really really garbage. Whether you want to be inspired by Pixar designs or Anime designs, nothing will gel with the garbage character model we have currently. They keep making it higher poly without increasing any of the animation budget, so everything just looks stilted and poor. That being said, I'm in the camp for more anime-inspired character designs, but less Final Fantasy and slightly more chibi (not like, very chibi, but slightly more cartoony).

I'll argue for no humans though, except Dr Robotnik. The whole point of Sonic's aethetic is that juxtaposition between woodland critters, and an evil scientist man. Dr Robotniks design is supposed to be comedic, but knows when to take itself seriously. As soon as you add more humans, it just ruins that whole juxtaposition, unless you do something to counter-balance it.

Consider it this way; would Sonic Adventure 1 be any worse or better, with the human characters removed? They should should consider why humans inclusion was important to be considered to be brought back. The humans were basically a way to show off the Dreamcast hardware, and not really anything more. Take Sonic Unleashed as another example; would the game be any worse or better with the human characters removed? I'd argue that the only reason they are there is to add to world building, which could have easily worked better with a more desolate city (the world is broken into pieces in the plot, it's in shambles, yet there's no reaction from anyone), with signs of life scattered across far and wide. That would be a lot more effective than, "EAT A HOTDOG" is.

 

Neither version of Eggman looks like a typical modern day anime character. It's a design that draws from an era when anime characters were generally, for want of a better term, more "cartoony" - think Osamu Tezuka, Doraemon, classic Lupin III, classic Dragon Ball.

Eggman was likely inspired by the Kurodako Brothers from Muteking, and Madonna was Jessica Rabbit through an '80s manga filter. Most Sonic media hasn't done a great job with having human characters who look like they belong next to Eggman. The closest so far is probably the President from the 1996 OVAs (if we're being pedantic, he's an elf-eared father to a catgirl, so not necessarily human, but the design sensibility still fits).

 

Well, that's something that ticks me off, design-wise.
If Eggman is human...make him look properly human.
That's why I say and will always say my favorite Eggman is 06.
Even that look can be made goofy if written decently enough.
Sonic06 simply ended up being a poor case of serious plot.

To add to the matter...
I also prefer humans designed in a style akin to SA1 and Sonic X.
Those kinda manage to mingle well with Eggman's current design.

 

The humans served the purpose of making Station Square look like a bustling city (by contrast with the islands from the classic games), and causing Perfect Chaos' destruction of it to have a greater impact. I'm glad that SA1 choose to go with a completely different setting from previous games, it kept things fresh and interesting, and added to the worldbuilding.

The very concept of Sonic Unleashed is Sonic traveling all over the world, visiting various locales and coming across all kinds of people. That was one of the game's highlights in fact, even if I wasn't too fond of the Pixar-esque humans. Replacing the hubs with desolate towns would have made Sonic's world look post-apocalyptic, which would have gone against the world depicted in previous games, and against the tone of the classic (and most) Sonic games.

 

Pretty sure Sonic Team had always intended for humans to be part of Sonic's world one way or another. Sonic was even supposed to have a human girlfriend at one point during Sonic 1's development, and there's the whole 'Mary Garnet' early backstory as well. Then there's that Sonic: Man of the Year short that was in Sonic Jam that features Classic Sonic and Eggman interacting with cartoony humans in a city.

So no, I'll argue that having no humans other than Eggman is stupid. Naka even once said that the reason humans didn't show up on the Genesis/Mega Drive was because those games were set on magical islands while humans are mostly located on the mainland continents (before the stupid 2 worlds retcon came into play). Adventure then expands on Sonic's world by bringing him and his friends to the mainland to contrast with the look of the Genesis games.

They don't have to appear in every game, but completely cutting them out of the world and canon is just plain dumb, in my opinion.

 

Well let's loop it back around.... what's the point of them being humans? As much as I hate Forces, I cannot deny that the idea of having an area inhabited by other anthropomorphic animals is much cooler than having humans, and also much more engaging as a story concept. By S3K, we've already been introduced to Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles as inhabitants of this world they've built, but no humans other than Robotnik. At that point, it's fine to assume that there are more anthro characters too. SA1 obviously understood this too, with the introduction of Tikal and Knuckles Clan being almost flawless introductions within the Sonic universe. The humans, on the other hand, were only just an easy addition, as humans are inherently easier to design.

Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with them being humans, far from it. Ironically, from the few trailers I've seen of the Sonic Movie (yes I haven't seen it yet, thanks pandemic), the usage of having them as humans serve the plot. But the justification for their inclusion should be more than surface level deep. It should be more than, "we need to add more NPCs so let's add humans". I know why SA1 went for humans (it's much easier to implement basic humans than basic anthro characters), but that's not here nor there.

My description wasn't perfect, but the idea I was getting at wasn't "do it my way", keep in mind that was one of the first ideas I came up with, but it was instead more of a way you could implement it in to make it effective as a story-beat, and less-so a pointless inclusion for the sake of "we need some character walking around". My whole post is in regards to how they should just think it through more. Humans aren't the problem by themselves, but they're a manifestation of Sonic Teams worst problem (having no direction with where they should go stylistically).

Yeah, definitely, they were definitely intended, but I just don't like how they've been handled up until this point. There's no problem with them being human, far from it, but it's just, give them a usage for being human. Sonic already established a world with those first three games, and although I understand with SA1 they were trying to bring the to the mainland to contrast the games, I don't think it works. I think it's very poorly done, at best. The original games being set on "a magical island" whilst then SA1 being set in the mainland continent is fine, but no effort is made to bridge the actual gap between them. It just feels more like a bandaid solution that's jarring, at least to me.

 

While I agree that Sonic Team could have made that clearer, and that's definitely a problem the series has in general; Sonic Team doesn't really seem to care too much about continuity, and they really should've done a better job at establishing the world and lore. The Genesis/Mega Drive games have the excuse of hardware limitations, but they really should've done something to make things more clear back then. Also, I'm going to say that I hated the anthros in Forces, and didn't find them being in Sonic's world to be 'cool' at all, since they were, you know... just copy and pasted Avatar presets (compared to the humans in the earlier games, which had more distinct designs), and just like with the human NPCs in the earlier games, Forces does nothing to establish the world at all, and Sonic Team straight up forgot that Green Hill is set on an island.

 

Yeah, definitely this. They pretend to care about continuity by referencing Green Hill 24/7, and even references rescuing genies in magic books or saving aliens in interstellar amusment parts, but really it's surface level deep on their care about continuity. I personally think the Megadrive games do the best job in the entire series at building lore and characters, without it feeling unnatural. But at the same time, I think half of SA1's lore fits perfectly, and the other half is jankily put together (this is more due to the merging of US and Japanese branding though, which I don't think there was a proper solution to, other than just retconing most of it, so I sympathise).

Okay, maybe I should rephrase... I like the idea lol :P

The idea itself of anthros in Sonic Forces is great. It's just like every other Sonic game, they fail to capitalize on an interesting story-beat. Then again, for some reason, it feels like both budget and time constraints hit Forces, which makes no sense with the amount of time it evidently took to make. I heard that it was due to most of the early development years going towards upgrading the Hedgehog Engine, but I don't know how true that actually is, and whether it actually affected development (or whether it was mismanagement.... again).

 

Think Laputa.

 

Laputa's a good example. Muteking was earlier though.

 

Oh damn, that's cool. You learn something new every day. Maybe Sonic humans should be based off of early anime/manga styles, then?