Complimenting Sonic Colours

Aquarium Park Act 1 and Planet Wisp Act 3 sit among my favorite Sonic music. They really nailed it there.

 

The DS game was a nice evolution of the previous Rush games. It's the one game in an extremely long time that I've bothered getting 100% on.
I think the Wii version is alright. I don't regret playing it at all, but it's just not my kind of game. The DS game is way more my style.

 

It's a pretty solid Mario game :p

 

I've never played Colors so can't comment on it's gameplay, but I do like that they went for some really unusual theme tropes for some of the stages, like Starlight Carnival.

 

Colors was good because it helped change the conversation about Sonic from, "Sonic was never good", to "Sonic has had misteps but continues to prove there is still something with a never ending appeal about that blue hedgehog who represents freedom itself."

After 06 and Unleashed and games following them had me just buying to go through the motions, Colors was so good that I fell in love with the franchise again. It's the reason I beat Sonic 3 and Knuckles finally and got to experience that masterpiece, it's the reason I started reading the comics and getting into the lore, it's also the reason I got deeper into the online fandom. Many early 20 something fans like myself told me it helped them with this same journey.

I feel that for a lot of people Sonic Colors is what helped them become Sonic stans who wanted to engross as much of the content as possible because it's a game that was fun and worked on so many levels that you wanted to go back and see what the fuss/hate for the other games were and you grabbed a lot of the charm that you forgot about.

Colors may not hold up now but it was a step in the right direction that Generations kept the momentum of (as well as Mr. Whitehead's CD port) and it was a very good time to be a Sonic fan. Shame that Lost World had such mixed reception and Forces and Boom just ended up bad because it'd have been nice to see it keep going. Mania and the movie were great but neither really rebirthed the franchise the way Colors did. I'll always appreciate it for doing so, despite how it worked out in the end.

 

After the disappointment that was Unleashed Wii, Colors felt like MAYBE the series was starting to dig itself out of the whole it was stuck in. They finally got to do some silly level themes after years stuck in Gritty Realism World, the game was actually fun to play, and the music was bitchin' (Asteroid Coaster is the best and if you disagree you're a filthy commie).

Shame Lost World decided to jump back in the pit...

 

I don't much care for how the story was presented in the Wii version, but the expanded (and according to Izuka, true version of the) story had a lot of good moments. Colors was definitely a return to the more colorful aesthetics of the earlier games which is appreciated tremendously and it proved that the Wii could handle that style of gameplay. At the time I was hoping the next game would be available for both next gen systems and the Wii without being essentially two different games. I can understand the complaints about it leaning a little too much into blocky 2D stages a-la Mario, but what 3D sections there are done pretty well.

I would like to think that Lost World looked at what Colors did and doubled down on some of the more unfortunate aspects of Colors though. Pontac and Graff took the decent if sometimes cringy and dumbed down humorous tone of the story and made it even worse in Lost World. 2D stages were a lot more emphasized in Lost World compared to Colors as well and they wholesale reused the same final boss in that game and Forces. While Colors would have been perfectly fine on it's own (Generations tended to do its own thing and turned out great after all), I think Sonic Team looked at its success and took the wrong lessons from it on why it was successful. Maybe that's part of the reason why it's so maligned nowadays, but honestly the game itself plays pretty well and should be judged on its own merits.

 

Sonic Colors is good. It is great. It is awesome. It is outstanding. It is amazing.

 

I...really, REALLY don't like Sonic Colours, but since this isn't a bashing topic, I guess I gotta be nice to this game for once in my life

-I hate the plot, but the new VAs they got for this game are amazing. Junichi Kanemaru will always be the definitive Sonic in my eyes, but Roger Craig Smith is my favorite English voice for him.
-Finally, Super Sonic is back to being playable in normal stages. And the first time in a 3D game too! I can't remember if Sonic 4 came before this game but still, this is pretty great.
-I like Asteroid Coaster's music.
-DS Colours is a great game, but I don't think this topic is refering to this version? I like it a lot, in any case.

 

I never played Wii Colors, but Colors DS was my first Sonic game (that wasn't Unleashed mobile or Ultimate Flash Sonic). I loved the Wisps, the places Sonic ran through, the gimmicks, the feeling of speed, meeting the other characters (that I didn't really know!) in the missions... I have vivid memories of beating Eggman's Nega-Wisp machine with the Final Colors Blaster, it was such an awesome moment.
I think I played it religiously for a couple of months, and accidentally found out, after beating the story mode, the Special Stages. Playing as Super Sonic in the secret boss fight is another great memory I have.
In the end, now I think I like Rush more (Funky Uncles will do that to a game) , but I'm super fond of Colors DS for essentially introducing me to the franchise.

 

For what Sonic Colours is, I think the game achieves what it set out to do decently.

For all the critiques that one can lobby at it, the game is solid. It has the limitations of being made for the Wii, but level themes are fairly varied, and although there is an abundance of 2D that I would prefer not be there, none of the levels (as far as I can remember) are obtuse to play. Nothing in the game made me downright angry (unlike Unleashed did), and the game certainly has a lot of fun to be had. The music is great, visually it looks stellar, and the story isn't obtrusive either (so if it isn't your cup of tea, it's not like it affects the game that much).

I think any of it's main critiques can be chalked up to limited development time, and being developed only for the Wii. It's a solid platformer with a fair bit of enjoyment to be had, and although in a retrospective lens it's worse than Generations is, that's unfair to compare both games.

 

Colors is one of the few times Sonic Team utilized the aesthetic sensibilities of the the classics without just blatantly and soulessly ripping them off. While the 80's and 90's geometric surrealism isn't as prominent, every single one of Colors' zones (outside of maybe Sweet Mountain, which is charming but a bit too cartoonish) could honestly show up in a Classic game with some slight modifications and not feel out of place--they feel like a modernization of that kind of style. That is highly commendable, I must admit.

 

I really enjoyed how Sonic Colours was basically HD Sonic Unleashed on the Wii, but only with the best parts. It always made me wonder why we couldn't get a more faithful port of Unleashed on the Wii (aside from Hedgehog Engine woes).

 

Let's see... Say something GOOD about Colours... Yes, I think I can do it with a huge lot effort... Umm... Oh, I know! It only came out on Nintendo systems and I think it was the last time Dimps touched anything. I'm probably wrong on the last one, though, so not that much good about the game. Nah, it's Colours, to the hell with that shit I never bothered to finish.

 

I honestly think that what sometimes seems like a _massive_ hate campaign against Colors is a lot more niche than it seems. I'm not saying nobody has their grievances with aspects of it. _I_ always had my grievances with it. But even if I'd actively DISliked it, it still seems ridiculous to say, "The point where people actually started liking Sonic games again was, in fact, the point where it all went wrong."

Lemme put it like this...



In 2016, the official Sonic YouTube channel put out a video commemorating Sonic's 25th anniversary, and this is how it described Colors. While I'm sure this made SOMEBODY mad at the time, I don't recall any backlash whatsoever. And heck, if you look at the recent comments on the video even NOW, nobody's talking about it.

Now, the people who hated Colors were ALWAYS there. Remember "TrueSonicSpirit"? They've just gotten a lot older, more articulate, and more nostalgic about the very different take on Sonic that they grew up with, which Colors served as a referendum on. And I think they've managed to convince themselves that the past 10 years have been SUCH an abject failure (Colors was even worse than 06 you guys, and Mania was just a nostalgia pandering fangame!), in the hopes that Forces' negative reception might be their one shot to actually get some version of what they want. There's not actually that many of them, but they make a LOT OF NOISE.

And to play devil's advocate... "some version of what they want" wouldn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. Us Oldbies have a collective fandom PTSD about the Sonic games of the 2000s, because we were old enough and critical enough and perceptive enough to KNOW just how bad things were getting. We saw Sonic go from an icon of the industry to its biggest laughingstock. No matter how we felt about the games personally, we knew what was happening, and it was THE worst time our fandom's ever been through.

So when we see younger fans who don't remember this stuff actually celebrating the games that ruined Sonic's reputation, we tend to have a kneejerk reaction. It's easy to feel like NOTHING about that should ever be repeated, NOTHING should ever be tried again, because IT SUCKED, and we don't ever want to see Sonic go through that again. But really, the problems of that era were the same problems we have now. There were a lot of good ideas, but they were undone by awful execution.

We think, "Why would they ever want to go BACK there?" But I don't think most of them actually DO. I don't think a higher-stakes, more character-focused story should just NEVER be tried again just because 06's was such garbage. Sonic games have never been written particularly well, but that doesn't mean they CAN'T be. I don't think Sonic needs to be the only playable character forever just because he was the one aspect that people liked in games that came out 20+ years ago. I don't think the failures Sega experienced in the 2000s should be holding them back from making great games NOW, and I can see why from a certain perspective, it'd feel like they ARE.

But Colors' reception will always be what it was, no matter how much you try to push back on it. It was exactly what Sonic needed in 2010, it's still a game most people can enjoy without qualifiers now, and it should be celebrated for that. We just should've been past NEEDING that by now, and it still feels like we aren't. But I think once we all collectively have SOMETHING new to focus on for the 30th anniversary, we'll be in a better position to reach a consensus on this stuff.

 

I never played it all the way through (the Wii didn't get much use after the novelty of the motion controls wore off for me) but from what I played I thought it was quite fun, the stage with the roller coaster stood out for me (Especially the music). I especially liked all the little bits of Eggman chatter during stages.

 

But Colors IS good. It has its flaws like any other game, but is a good game.

People bashing Colors nowadays is just because it is the game that started the dumb storytelling that was carried on to Generations and mainly Lost World (and maybe even the Boom show). But it was exactly what was needed at the time, after those werehogs, Black Doom aliens and bestialities we had. And now we just had another serious storytelling that turns out to be a mediocre game.

Comparing the main 3D games (jokes aside for Colors being most 2D), Colors is certainly better than Shadow, 06, Lost World and Forces and to me is also better than Heroes and Unleashed. So if it is right behind SA1, SA2 and Generations, it's not a bad game at all.