I like Sonic 4.

I'm not sure how you'd really be able to measure that, either way. You could poll a single community, but then not everyone would necessarily respond. You could poll multiple communities, but not every Sonic Fan™ is necessarily online. And even then, there's a lot of room for nuance; someone could be less positive on Colors and Generations now than they were at release, and find the continued praise they receive somewhat unearned, and yet still like them well enough.
(it's me, I'm someone, and I don't know which of these two boxes I belong in)

 

Exactly, social media only represents the loudest, MOST engaged people, and it's unfortunately VERY VERY easy to take those screaming the loudest as representative of the whole. Let's not forget, Colors just got a re-release that reviewed on par with the original, and Generations is still making so much money that Sega highlighted it in their financial report. Those games are still very well-regarded, but happy people don't yell as much. :P

 

Fans like them, yes, but that doesn't mean they don't want the series to get better than those games, to rise above that rut of low standards the series was trapped in for the past decade? Does any Sonic fan actually want the entire 3d branch to be nothing but minor variations of Colours in perpetuity, garnering 7/10's from game journos for the forseeable future?

 

It's difficult to quantify how many fans hold these views but I also think it's undeniable that it's not a small percentage.

Just to make it clear, I don't think these fans are bad or anything. I just think it's funny that fan opinions on older games (which I think is reasonable to assume isn't marginal) is more critical than the actual critics were.

 

Thank God the game failed then. I don't want to see that direction ever again.

 

Insert Big Lebowski "that's just, like, your opinion, man" .gif here.

 

I played the hell out of Sonic 4 back in 2010-2011 on both Wii and iPod Touch, racking up 999 lives on each and getting into the top ten on some of the leaderboards for a short while.

It was disappointing back then because it had the number 4 slapped on it so the trick was to just look at it as a cheap Wiiware / mobile app. It absolutely was not a proper sequel to the MegaDrive games, though it was fun, if extremely flawed. I played through it last year and my opinion on it hasn’t changed, though it’s aged a lot more than the originals ever have and ever will.

I haven’t gone back to Part 2 since it came out, just having something with an unresolved cliffhanger just kinda makes it feel unnecessary in the grand scheme of things.

 

Adding onto that, positivity is also much, MUCH less likely to get attention ESPECIALLY on Twitter, because the things that trend get the most engagement, and what gets the most engagement is what provokes the strongest emotional response, and the EASIEST emotional response for social media to trigger is anger. For instance, talking up the things I liked about Sonic Colors Ultimate a few months ago on Twitter was... well, actually, it was a lot like how it felt trying to highlight any positive point about Sonic 4 back in 2010, haha. It's just kind of ignored, like you threw a pebble at a tsunami.

 

I hope there is a 120fps mod for Sonic 4.

 

I enjoyed Episode 2. The physics still need a rework obviously, but overall Episode 2 was far more polished conceptually and in execution.

I do think the entire game needs a 'Complete' version rerelease with current gen resolution and performance upgrades, as well as incorporating Sonic's Episode 2 character model exclusively across the entire game.

The game is not beyond repair. I think with a little effort, they could rerelease it standalone digitally and even on physical as part of a collection.

 

I'd go a step farther and say most people are just more openly critical of it now.
Speaking as someone who was very much guilty of being the in the "you can't criticize Colors" crowd back when Colors was new, it's positive reviews made people very quick to silence, sideline and discredit those who actually voiced complaints with the game. For others, it was enough at the time to ignore or downplay the flaws of the game.

Even now I though I don't really hear anyone calling it straight up bad.

 

Its the classic "Silent Majority/Vocal Minority" argument. The loudest people in the room will generally assume that their voices speak for the majority when the actual truth is that most people don't actually care that much or are just fine.

Colors' reception speaks for itself, but it should be noted that Ultimate has slighter lower scores than the Wii original and is sitting in more mixed territory as opposed to the more positive reception it had. And if you look at the user score, it dropped significantly from the 80's to the 50's.

So Color's reception nowadays seems less "ZOMG BEST 3D SONIC GAME EVER" and more "Yea, it's ok I guess" as it doesn't really have a string of mediocre to awful games to be compared to. Like yea, Colors is better than Forces....but that's not really much of an achievement.

 

I think it's safe to say the lower score is 100% due to Ultimate being the victim of review bombing. I don't think you can really trust user scores nowadays (I mean this in general; basically every major game release gets review-bombed if there's something about it people don't like).

 

Eh, I don't know about that one. Ultimate was very much in a...less than solid state at release. I find it weird if anything none of these things were brought up in any professional reviews.

 

Well yea, but it still illustrates the point; the game has fallen out of favor.

 

1) Few outlets reviewed the Switch version. (And even the one I can think of that did, NintendoLife, gave it an 8/10.)

2) Sonic fans blew the whole thing hilariously out of proportion. Ultimate's issues are definitely worth pointing out (hurrah for patches), but they aren't going to seriously impact the vast majority of players. Reviewers didn't report on them because they didn't even notice them.

 

I think potentially giving your audience an epileptic seizure is something bad...

Nintendo literally gave people refunds for the Switch version. How often does that happen.

 

Nintendo will give you a "one-time" refund for basically any reason if you push hard enough. I've seen it cited in much less egregious cases than this.

Nonetheless, yeah, a glitch that nasty definitely WASN'T blown out of proportion. I'm glad everyone tracked down what the exact cause was and it was fixed quickly. But it was so bizarre and memetic, it definitely colored perception of the game, even though none of the other versions had it.

To tie this back to Sonic 4, it's kind of funny: I've never seen a fandom disagree so much with a game getting 7s and 8s out of 10, not because they thought those scores should be higher, but because they wanted them to be LOWER.