It is nearly 5 am and I am giggling like a fucking weirdo trying to comprehend this post. It is amazing. Thank you for this post. Thank you.
Monitors are definitely more fun to jump on. You don't jump on item capsules, you jump into them. I like both signposts and goal rings, but I'd go for signposts, since I associate them with the classic games which I played as a kid. I think goal rings probably work better in 3D. I also don't agree that the aesthetics change significantly because of hardware. Well, in some cases I think they do, such as with Lost World, but I don't think Adventure 1 and 2's differing art styles were because of the hardware. And I know that this is an absurd post, but I just wanted to answer it seriously for a laugh
I theorized about that they have to adjust the artstyle every time because of the ingame graphics (character models, levels, special effects etc.) So, if the graphics were better... maybe the artstyle would improve, too?
I don't agree with this at all. When Sonic Adventure 2 did Green Hill it was very literal to the Mega Drive version, so looked out of place with the rest of the game. Sonic Generations' more liberal reinterpretations of old levels aligned them all in one cohesive art direction. They could just as easily ended up with a Super Mario Odyssey style patchwork quilt (not necessarily a bad thing), but they deliberately chose not to go that route. The only one that still stands out is Crisis City, but there was only so much they could do with that game. Even then, they wisely chose a stage that only had Iblis enemies, so Eggman's robots maintain stylistic consistency throughout the game.
Yeah, when I see Sky Sanctuary in Sonic All Stars Racing Transformed, I think of Sonic Generations and not Sonic 3. Sonic Generations did a good job of celebrating Sonic's past while also keeping its own visual identity.
If any of this was true, these games: ...would had been the biggest success the series had ever seen and the brand they are attached to would still be around today; rather than both of these statements being the total opposite. This is not the 2000s anymore (when this argument actually had merit) and it hasn’t been for an entire decade. Some of y’all need to crawl out from under that rock and acknowledge what has happened since then. The “unpleasable fans” gotcha argument is also an old and lame ditty that burnt out a long time ago for several key reasons, but that’s worth an entire response of its own so I won’t get into it here for the sake of brevity.
The failure of the Wii U works for Rise of Lyric, but doesn’t explain the failure of Shattered Crystal and Fire & Ice on the far more successful 3DS (as well as the other Sonic games released for it like Generations and Lost World). Recall the 3DS had sold 50 million units by the end of 2014 and ultimately went on to sell over 70 million overall by the time Nintendo pushed it out of focus in favor for the Switch. And while the Wii U was a commercial sales flop, it still had a high attach rate for software sales. You had nearly ten times the amount of games sold (100M+) than hardware sold (13M). 2014 was also one of the better years —if not the best year— for the console in terms of software sales with games like Smash Bros. and Mario Kart 8 (the best-selling Wii U game) being released. Two windfalls RoL failed to benefit from.
It's just a painfully untrue argument. The game the hardcore fans have been pushing for most was something like Mania and it was even made by the same people who they wanted to lead the project. Sonic Mania was the most successful Sonic game in ages. It's also a game which virtually all Sonic fans can agree was good. Those who don't think it was are in the fringe minority.
Sonic spin off titles didn't do that well on the 3DS at all iirc. The game was also poorly advertised and had to live in the shadow with how much SEGA dropped the ball with Rise of Lyric. Btw all the top selling games for the WiiU were Nintendo produced and published games. I'm talking top 15. And by time you get to 15 you get to the barely crossed 1 million titles. So...
Sonic Forces... If I had to say what I liked about this game, it would be some of the music. This game came across as a jack of all trades, master of none ordeal; it didn't know what it wanted to be, so it tried to appeal to everyone to compensate for its lack of focus. The result was a game that feels like an incomplete, rushed sequel to Sonic Generations.
Yeah, Sonic (spinoff) titles doing poorly on the 3DS is kinda the point I was trying to make. No disagreements there about SC's reception being hurt by RoL, although I'd say SC wasn't that poorly advertised. I recall the two titles being mostly in tandem with each other with regards to advertising. I also don't disagree with you about games made by Nintendo being the best-performing games on the Wii U, and everything else taking up tablescraps. All I'm really saying here is for a platform that underperformed to begin with, RoL did *especially* poorly there.
A few more observations about Forces: 1. It has Steam trading cards. One of those cards is Chaos. I just think it's amusing considering how much of a non-entity this thing is. I can't even scream "False Advertising!" cos they just showed that he was in the game (which he is, for like a grand total of 30 seconds), not that they promised him a boss fight or anything. (Although, does "fight Sonics iconic foes" count, cos we never fight one of Sonic's iconic foes. In fact we don't even fight two of them, we don't get a fight with Shadow. and Zavok's only iconic cos Iizuka keeps trying to force him down our throats. Anyway next one) 2. The game has daily missions. That also amuses me, Sonic Team thinking that people would be constantly coming back to this game that you can beat in 2 hours like it's an MMO or something. 3. While the Red Rings unlock the extra levels, they also unlock access to two other collectables: numbers and moons. Collecting these gives you... NOTHING, except achievements presumably. That's another similarity to 06, in this case, the Gold & Silver medals. Are we sure Forces wasn't meant to be a sequel to 06? Just replace Infinite with Mephiles and the Phantom Ruby with the chaos emeralds? Would explain why Silver's here at least.
I’m willing to bet the addition of Chaos and the other old villains was a last-minute decision, which may explain why Zavok and Metal Sonic are the only ones who serve as bosses. It’d certainly make sense if they were going to be new villains, like members of the Jackal Squad, but Sega wimped out. Also speaking of Mephiles, he actually IS in an early version of the script.
By what metric? The only reports I see on figures is that it sold over one million copies. Lost World seems to have at least sold 700,000. Forces is hard to pin down. There are rumors it has also sold over 1,000,000. Three seconds of Googling yields this: "Sonic Generations has sold nearly over 3 million copies worldwide as of April 30, 2014, making it the fifth best selling Sonic game to date, behind Sonic the Hedgehog (over 4 million), Sonic Unleashed (also over 4 million), Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (over 6 million), and Sonic Heroes (also over 6 million)." So, I'm not seeing any indication that Sonic Mania was any sort of second-coming in terms of sales figures, though I'm not sure what "ages" means. If it means six years or more... Is there any data to support this? I see many Sonic fans that take their own feelings of the franchise and interpolate them to be the majority opinion. Maybe Sonic Mania is popular with more than 50% of the fan base. But how do you even define the fanbase? The terms used are kind of fluffy and the overall claim seems unverifiable to me. This doesn't contradict anything I said. If you actually wanted to prove my argument wrong, you would find an example of a game that everyone agrees was good and should be the future direction of the series, not one that everyone agrees was bad. (And in particular, a 3D game since that's what we were talking about and it's a pipe dream to think that something like Sonic Mania is going to be the actual future direction of Sonic. At best it might be a sub-brand, in much the same way Boom was.) You can probably find consensus that most people don't find it fun to be smacked in the face with a hammer. That doesn't mean there is consensus among those same people on what IS fun. You've got folks in this thread defending Sonic '06. That enough should give anyone pause that my claim might have merit.
Uh, where did some of these sales numbers come from? They seem dead wrong. Sonic 1 has sold at least 23 million copies, and the last reported Sonic Heroes numbers (from 2007, well after its release) were 3.4 million. The Unleashed and Sonic 2 numbers sound accurate though.
I do wanna comment on the "future direction" bit at least. I know Iizuka interviews are easy to poke fun at but there's one where he talks about how he feels Mania was a turning point for the series (this link, search for "post-Mania" for the exact quote). Since Sonic Mania, we have seen a number of things happen for the series that I think may speak to how they want to treat it going forward: - little to no more "self-deprecation" on social media outlets (for context, they would often use their less well-received games (usually '06) as punchlines for some posts, and this could get a little exhausting) - bonus animations on the Youtube account, as well as more new 2D art - Team Sonic Racing was delayed when it needed to be (obviously, this is what *should* happen, but still) and from what I can tell, was received well - movie delayed to improve the Sonic design, and this obviously did very well - new comic series based outright on the game continuity, which is also doing well So like, since Mania there has been a lot of positivity and confidence with the brand as a whole, I think? Obviously, Forces is the anomaly here, and it feels weird that, as the Sonic game worked on by the main dev team, it came out between Mania & TSR which are simply more polished games. The most SEGA has really directly acknowledged it since release was saying that it was a financial success. But even with that, they decided to build off the end of that game as the starting point for the IDW comic. The latest video on the Sonic Youtube account even highlights many of the "dark age" Sonic games. My point is that with the idea of "Mania influencing the direction of the franchise," it seems to me that it applies more to their mindset regarding how they want to handle the brand, rather than outright implying "classic Sonic will be the only future of the franchise." They want to handle it confidently and proudly, rather than poking fun at itself, being ashamed, or hollowly chasing after trends. Though...maybe I am just reading too deep into that! And, of course, even if this is true at all, the extent to which they will be able to do that will kinda depend on the quality of the next "main" game.
In 2015, Haruki Satomi talked about how Sega had sometimes put deadlines before quality and lost customers' trust, and he wanted to rebuild the Sega brand. Sonic Forces obviously didn't reflect this new outlook - maybe there was too much already locked in place for a Christmas 2017 release by then? Who knows. Aaron Webber reiterated this "quality over quantity" outlook in one of the Sonic livestreams few months ago, saying that when there was a new Sonic game each year the rushed production schedule would sometimes lead to the quality of the games not being where it needed to be, so they decided that going forward they're going to put more time into them.
The next game could certainly clarify things. The length of the development cycle means we only get two "real" Sonic games per 5 year period, so every other title seems to be some kind of "anniversary" game and the series doesn't seem able to get any sort of firm footing. It feels like to me that the series direction is in a state of transition, but it's hard to tell when a game only pops out once every three years. More data points is always better. I took his statement as PR talk to cover for long development cycles since the only time in Sonic history the main series popped out a title every year was in the classic era when the games were (arguably) at their best. Adventure was 4 years after Sonic 3. Adventure 2 was 3 years after that. Heroes was 2 years after that. Sonic '06 was 3 years after that. Unleashed was 2 years after that. Colors was 2 years after that. And Generations was 1 year after that. So is he talking about Colors and Generations being the rushed titles of "quantity over quality?" I'm not fond of either of those games and I wouldn't agree with such a statement. Maybe he was referring to some of the side games, but I always assumed other studios handled those. Maybe Sonic Team provided some measure of resources for oversight and that served as a distraction from the main products? I don't know. I just can't take his comment seriously when Forces was released 4 years after Lost World.
Okay, I can see that. But my point is more, Classic Sonic has an extremely strong art direction. That's why Mania and fangames can make all new zones that nonetheless feel Sonic visually, in a way you really can't for the 3D titles. I wish the 3D series could keep the surreal aesthetic of the Genesis games, but... Man. The 2000's were an amazing time for games, but they absolutely ruined others. It absolutely sucks that Sonic Team had to chase realism because that was the in-thing and we had a whole decade of gaming where the sensibilities of the early gaming years were derided as laughable kitsch. Man, fuck that attitude. Thank god the whole gaming community and industry matured and the indie boom made spritework and surrealism respected again, but holy shit, Sonic was one of many series absolutely ruined by this. By the time attitudes had matured, Sonic had been left chasing realism so long it had no core visual identity for the 3D games. Even after the chase towards realism hit its nadir in Sonic 06, the next game afterwards (Unleashed) still retained the whole "Sonic in the REAL WORLD" aesthetic, just with cartoony caricature. And Unleashed looked good. It really did. But damn, I wish the 3D games looked like this in 3D: Being a child of the Adventure era, I wish that 3D Sonic were basically Adventure-era storytelling and Classic-era aesthetics.
