Trying to start debunking the "Generations of Sonic Fans" perception.

What I really want to know is... Does anyone really love Sonic Heroes if it wasn't their first Sonic game?

 

I can't answer that, but I'll give you some insight. Sonic Heroes was by far the most divisive game in my poll. Let's see... of the 22 people who said Heroes was their favorite, they all fell between the ages of 18 and 27 (with one 18 year old and two 27s). That'd mean they were all still kids (10 at the oldest) when Sonic Heroes was released. For the sake of comparison, the 45 people who said it was their LEAST favorite ran the gamut from 14 to 36.

Of course, one weakness of the poll is that I only asked for favorite and least-favorite mainline games, so where any title ranks for people beyond those extremes isn't captured.

 

I actually did enjoy Heroes a lot when it came out. I was 13 at the time, and so I was young enough to still be really into Sonic but I was also starting to get old enough when I wanted to be more adult. Lol! I do remember preferring SA1 and 2 at the time though, for many of the reasons we discuss now.

I've never thought about it really until now, but I was so young when I played the games. Six when I played the classics. Ten when I played Adventure 1 and 2. I never remember being so young but I was!

This is what I mean by how farcical these generation divides are though. People treat Adventure and Heroes as completely different time capsules. I was 10 when I played Adventure and 13 when I played Heroes. Hardly a generation divide!

 

I would say this is the difference between individuals and a collective; people's individual taste will vary, which is natural because we're all human with our own preferences at the end of the day. But it's not like we can poll the individual person on the planet, or hell, even within the fandom. So we generalize because it's easier to group together than it is to get each and every one of their opinions. I'm very guilty of doing this myself, probably more so than is really needed and I need to address that part of myself.

But it's a different ball game with a business; businesses are almost entirely concerned with demographics or focus groups, they don't see people as individuals, they see them as a group to be measured. I think the generalization mindset is so prevalent, because it's easy. It's so very simple to just group people together and make assumptions about them, I do it, and almost certain everyone else has done so too at a certain point. Labelling people who prefer SATAM as "Archie fans" even if they actually like the games too, or labelling people as "Classic fans" even if they actually like the games after 1998. It's easy, and it's comforting for a person to do that, particularly an immature teenager who has yet to understand the concept of nuance.

This is why Twitter Sonic fans are so damn annoying to deal with; at the risk of defying my own words and doing more generalizing lol, it really does feel like at times most of Twitter are just a bunch of teenagers acting on their first emotion. It doesn't help that Twitter is intentionally designed this way with a 220 character limit on what you can actually say. It actively encourages generalizing and small comments.



It's one of the worst parts of human nature, and still very much prevalent outside of the scope of a fandom. It's a real world issue as well.

 

I was already 10 when Sonic 1 came out (and would be 11 soon on the same year), so I suppose I'm a classic fan by default, not just because I knew the original games when they were fresh, but also because that was the time of the console wars and the massive advertising of Sonic, and there were toxic people in that war between Mario and Sonic just like with this "war" between Sonic styles, and also people who didn't give a damn and just chose one because they couldn't afford both. In a similar fashion, a lot of kids from the adventure era were also anime fans, and SA2 nailed it for them, so they feel that's their era and their game, plus they're also the ones who had to hear us complain about Sega not giving us what they had given us in the past, which was a fair complain because Sega risked losing customers but wasn't fair at all for the newcomers. And then this repeated some way or another, so "generations of Sonic fans" is true to some extent as a general sentiment that obviously manifests with toxic strength on internet.

Of course, those events happening don't mean a rule, and talking to people on an individual basis will always discard that, much like Sonic isn't really a joke for non-Sonic fans despite so many people on the internet attacking this franchise. I declare myself guilty of having kept a grudge against modern games until 2 or 3 years ago, and I didn't notice but I had been really toxic at times without trying or even noticing it. But, again, it was about expecting something that resembled what I liked and not finding it when a new game was released, not really because it was unthinkable for anyone to like boost games or dimps games, or whatever.

There's a recent experience I had that I wanted to share some day here and this topic seems to be appropiate enough because we're talking about prejudices and Sonic identity to some extent. So, here we go:

When Mania Plus came out, I bought a physical copy of the Switch version despite not having a Switch (and still haven't) just because I wanted the goodies that came with it. A friend recently bought a Switch, so I took my game to her house to give someone the chance to use it instead of sitting useless, and I played the game for a while with some public there. Well, some of their comments and the way I played that day made me think "Hey! This isn't really that different from the boost games, and I'm enjoying it on those terms". Of course, the format is different, but the fact I could find a connection between the kind of gameplay I like the most and the kind of gameplay I like the least, the fact that two so different things keep a similar identity immediately made me think I had been too harsh with that gameplay due to a combination of biased expectations through personal preferences and judging the concept by the quality of the products I had tried it in. I mean, boost gameplay is not the reason why Forces sucks.

I could add stuff about why Sonic is not for everyone despite being so great for us, which is something else I thought about that day (my public got almost dizzy seeing me play special stages), but I'll leave thar for when it's relevant. What I want to remark is nuance does exist among fans and also among not fans despite the vocal parts of the internet being toxic echo chambers so often.

EDIT: Forgot to answer this:

Sonic Heroes is not that bad, it was just really bad after classic and adventure games, the first main game that really failed to almost everyone's expectations (not really classic, not really adventure). I won't say I love it, but I prefer it over most later games I've played.

 

Interesting thread. I know I've brought up my history with Sonic in very similar conversations to this topic before, so I'll say my peace here I guess.

My introduction to Sonic was almost certainly Sonic 2 (which is still my favorite Sonic game, followed by Sonic 1). I started playing Sonic 2 at a very young age, and the timeline beyond that is honestly kind of fuzzy since I was so young at the time. It's possible that I played Sonic 1 and maybe the PC port of Sonic CD at this time as well, but I have no distinct memory of those games before later (we had a Sonic 1 case with no cartridge in it, and one of our old computers had an image file of the Sonic CD title screen saved to the desktop... I also may have a manufactured memory mixing the life monitors with the Metal Sonic projectors, since I used to have a strange memory of Metal Sonic monitors appearing in Sonic 1).

One of my older brothers got a GameCube in 2004 I believe, so between '04 and '05 is presumably when I first played the Sonic games from the early 2000s. I had to have played SADX at least once, because I had memory of some specific things from that game (primarily the image of Perfect Chaos bursting out of the building as seen in the intro cinematic), but I don't have distinct memories of playing this one either. It's not something I was nostalgic for, since I don't really remember playing it back then. But Heroes and SA2B I do remember playing, and those are very nostalgic for me. The thing is, out of the three of them, SA1 (with Dreamcast graphics) is by far my favorite, and I don't really consider Heroes a "good" game now. Didn't really get to play Shadow's game because my parents saw "mild language" on the back of the case and made us return it. I'm kind of glad I didn't waste any time on that one in hindsight.

I must've played Riders when it was pretty new, and likewise Sonic '06 since my brother would've had an xbox360 by then. I liked Riders at the time, and while I still like it, I'm really bad at it and rarely play it because it's so hard for me to actually have fun with it. Sonic '06 was weird. I don't remember thinking it was particularly bad at the age of 6/7, but it was weird for a number of reasons, and it was difficult, but that could be said about all the Sonic games at that time in my life. If I encountered significant glitches, I can't specifically remember them, but I do remember the loading screens. I think it was around 2006 that we got another Sonic 1 cartridge as well, and playing through that taught me the importance of pressing down. When Secret Rings came out, I played probably the first level and thought it was awful, so I stopped there. Unleashed was a similar situation, but it was less "this is awful" and more "this is boring." I think it was UnWiished, so I can't comment on how I would've reacted to the HD version. I didn't play Black Knight because Secret Rings was so bad. I did play Sonic 4: Episode 1, and I thought it was really bad.

My awareness of new Sonic games skipped Colors' release somehow, so Generations was the next thing I played, and the biggest reason I was interested in that is because I was a classic Sonic fanboy (still sort of am). I squeezed as much as I could out of that game, and I remember enjoying myself overall, though some aspects of the game were a little weird. Now days I can't stand it. And I should probably also mention that it was around this time that I finally was able to play 3&K, though I played vanilla Sonic 3 first before I got a S&K cartridge. It was cool and amazing, but after a while when the excitement of a "new" classic Sonic game wore off, there were things that felt off about it over time. I actually considered CD better than 3&K when I first played the Taxman remake on PS3 (had to have been a year later), though my thoughts on that ranking are a little more complicated these days.

Basically, I experienced what are often considered Sonic's best and worst outings in my formative childhood years.

 

I dug into the data some more, and found more evidence that while some trends are relevant and noticeable, the idea that there's some kind of harsh generational divide between Sonic fans of different ages might not be. The charts are pretty big, so

Spoiler

A few inferences:

• Classic-style games are the most consistently favored across all age ranges. Those old enough to have had a Genesis/Mega Drive really favor them.
  
• Adventure-style games spike for 23-27 (again, the age range that would've grown up with them), and fall off a bit afterward.
• A boost game being your favorite has the most significant correlation with age, with a sharp dropoff after 22.
• Younger respondents (under 23) are pretty evenly split between Adventure and boost games. Older groups tend have a stronger preference for whatever style was en vogue when they were kids.

Heroes and Lost World don't fit in these formulas and weren't counted among this dataset, but only 25 out of 587 respondents picked one of them, so I don't think they'd skew things much anyway.

 

That sounds more like confirmation bias that the side you like is the better one.

Note that in all categories except the last one, Adventure and Boost together (making “Modern” as a whole) equate to more of their pies than classic.

Not even to mention that the last one is representative of the same thing you call on the Adventure fans for; people who grew up with those games.

 

I mean I was introduced to Sonic by the Nostalgia Critics review of AoStH/SatAM, which inspired me to seek out the latter show, and to get Generations as my first game for Xmas 2011. But I love the Adventure era. If I wasn't proof enough that "your first sonic era is your favourite" is a fallacy, then nothing is.

 

...I mean, I don't know how you're interpreting the data, but no, I'd say that's not the case at all. On the contrary, I'd say it's notable just what a significant proportion of younger fans prefer games and/or styles of games that came before their time. I've seen bad-faith arguments on either side of the Classic/Adventure debate that, "You only like what you like because of NOSTALGIA!" And while nostalgia is surely a factor for most of us, it's kind of amazing that nearly a fifth of respondents 13-19 say their favorite Sonic game is Sonic Adventure 2, which came out before all of them were born, and which I would say has aged noticeably in the past 20 years. If what you said were accurate, we should expect to see the Adventure style much less represented among teens.

Rather, I think it indicates that, in accordance with what Shiro Maekawa said about how he didn't like Mega Drive-era Sonic, he wrote SA2 to appeal to his tastes instead, and that in turn resonated with a different group of people. The games that spun out of SA2's success over the next few years appeal to different tastes than the classics, and it's not just a nostalgic niche who has these preferences. It's not too different from more than a quarter of teens saying their favorite was Sonic Mania, a game that some have similarly tried to tear down as "nostalgia pandering for oldbies." While what you grew up with certainly CAN influence your tastes, plenty of fans share those tastes regardless of their age.

All this tells us is which gameplay style is featured in people's favorite games. This tells us nothing about whether they like or don't like the other styles. Also, the boost style is noticeably, uhh, boosted as you go back in the dataset. Only 11% of 28+ says a boost game is their favorite, compared to around 30% for 13-22. Maybe it'll continue to be more embraced by newer fans. I'll have to check again in a few years.

We don't know how often an Adventure game cracks the top 5 for someone who picked Mania. And titles like Colors are barely represented in my data, because not many people picked it as their favorite OR least favorite, so it's impossible to see many trends related to it.

It's also notable that the three least-liked game in the series were representative of each of the three styles: Sonic 06, Sonic 4, and Sonic Forces. Here's how that works out among an evenly-distributed age range:

I mean, sure, if we want to talk character designs, here's the entire data set broken down that way. But since the most popular AND least-popular boost games have both Sonics in a starring role...



and



I feel framing the data this way might be a bad use of polling, haha. Take it with a grain of salt. Modern Sonic's been in more of people's least-favorite games, sure, but he's also been in MANY MORE mainline games in a very different industry from the classic era. I'm positive the vast, VAST majority of fans would've liked the same games they liked and disliked the same ones they didn't regardless of which design was in it.

 

Should it really come off as a surprise that a place called Sonic Retro, are heavily biased against games that don't appeal to their specific niche in spite of empirical data that blatantly contradicts that?

The Classic games are definitely the most preferred style overall, but that's not the equivalent of saying that every style after is a minority.

That chart lists 30% of adolescents liking the Adventure games, which is only ten percent less than the ones who prefer the Classics. Bear in mind that adolescents were not born in the time those two styles debuted, and there's still a significantly representation.

If you somehow interpret that as "a minority prefer Adventure" then you literally cannot read. A 30:40 split is not "a minority"

What that actually tells me that adolescents, the actual target demographic of the series roughly love each style of gameplay with a slight preference towards classic

 

This is hardly empirical data, that'd arise from scientific observation. Guys, really, I think these results are fun and interesting, and they point to some trends that contradict what the noisiest, angriest part of the community keeps yelling about. It indicates that no matter what style of game you like, you've got plenty of company. That's nice! But this is just interpretation of a single survey, and polling itself is INFAMOUSLY difficult and inaccurate, especially on the internet. It may indicate some preferences among a self-selecting sample of people who wanted to take a survey, but we can't use it to prove anything.

 

Oh believe me, I think your polls make good points, don’t worry about that. I think the response from Rhythm and 5993 is pointed more at Overlord like mine was, haha.

And yeah, ultimately the most preferred games in the series by a grand majority are the classic ones. But I think going by the rest of it, none of that has to do with what design is where or the exact execution of that era, but that the classics are good games.

I feel like they get put on a pedestal so hard that we (as in, particularly older sects of the fanbase) take for granted them as a standard-setter and forget their merits as just games. Like, holding them so highly that we forget why they’re good and look toward arbitrary things as the answer like “oh because it looked this way” or “oh because it didn’t do this”, rather than just acknowledging “hey, rolling down a hill with multiple paths and pretty colors is fun”. lol

 

Yea, it was directed at Overlord, not you Josh.

Sonic fans are just in that weird ass bubble where the vocal fans from all sides think they're more represented than they actually are, but hey fandom echo chambers aren't really anything new. And they're gonna keep happening cuz Internet.


So next time you see someone on Twitter crying about Adventure, just remember that they only make up a minority of the fandom at large and do not speak for everyone.

The silent majority do in fact like ALL Sonic games to an extent, they just don't feel the need to vocalize it like the vocal parts of the fandom do.

 

I grew up with the Classics, got all the games soon after release (except for Sonic & Knuckles, which for some reason I constantly rented instead of buying a copy). Never liked any cartoons, comics or derivate products.

I was a bit late for Adventure, but bough an used Dreamcast around 2002 just to play Adventure 1 and 2. I could never really get into those games and soon forgot about them.

After that I gave some 3D games on the PlayStation 2 a try (Heroes, Unleashed), but found them really boring and hardly played more than a couple of hours each. Then I basically stopped buying consoles, so I couldn't play any Sonic games for a while, but the few times I had the opportunity to play Sonic games on someone else's console the games simply failed to get my attention for more than a few minutes.

So yeah, I'm a fan of the classic games exclusively. Once Sonic started with the bad physics, cutscenes, voice acting, cringy storytelling, it was basically over for me.