Sonic Dream Team (New 3D Game from Hardlight, coming to Apple Arcade December 5)

I'm not one of them, share your winnings with me.

You guys think this is the full extent of playable characters? What we have right now feels weird to be honest. If it were just the Fast Friends (ugh) and Cream, that'd be fine, it's the Advance 2 lineup, but Rouge just feels kinda...there, given she's pretty much associated with Shadow/Team Dark. I imagine they wanted to balance out the gender ratio among the cast, but you could have Blaze for that, who actually has a connection to Cream and then we'd have all the characters who appeared in Rush (except Nega but does anyone honestly care about him?).

If this does turn out to be it, I honestly respect SEGA's restraint in not shoving Shadow into either this or Frontiers despite his popularity. Maybe they're finally getting a clue about the issues with his characterisation and are holding off on him until they've really set on what direction they want to take the character in.

 

It seems they're very focused on expanding the playable female cast. There was a comic page somewhere tying in to the announcement that showed Vanilla talking to Amy and Rouge about Cream going in an adventure with them. Looks like they're semi-officially all friends now.

Besides that, it seems pretty clear there are three types of character: Thse wh run (Sonic and Amy), those who glide (Knuckles and Rouge) and those who fly (Tails and Cream). So that's why they picked her and not Blaze. It's not a Sonic Heroes kind of character-type.

Which I like, by the way.

 

We take our video toys very seriously around here

 

I think they want to have a balanced male to female cast. Also, apparently they're supposed to be duos, with Sonic & Amy playing the same, Tails & Cream playing the same and Knuckles & Rouge playing the same.

 

They want more female representation, methinks. Same reason why most of the new IDW characters are girls.

EDIT: Aaaaaand I posted this before seeing that the question was already answered... Whoops.

 

Because she's always been associated with Shadow since her debut, so it's pretty jarring they're just moving away from that all of a sudden.

I guess since she was Knuckles' rival and kinda sorta love interest, it makes sense?


I do think it just comes down to diversity and representation. As mentioned, between the games and comics, there's been a huge push for more heroic female characters as of late and of course, firmly making Amy into a hero on par with Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles trio and formally making it into a quartet.

I think it's more because the Sonic 3 movie is coming out next year, where he's gonna be headlining it and obviously bring in swoves of new fans, so they're just waiting until then to start aggressively pushing him all over again.

Sega are aware of how attention he draws, so it's smart to build that anticipation up. Far cry from the era when they just shoved him into everything regardless if he fit or not.

 

Going off your description, that's probably from the end of IDW's Chao Races & Badnik Bases arc, which Rouge was involved in very much for her own reasons, manipulating Amy and Cream by extension into helping her out (though it did have an unintended altruistic side-effect in the end of freeing some abused Chao and kicking Clutch to the curb). It wasn't just some jolly she went on with the girlies. Granted, I expect her presence here to have a similar justification.

The observation that she's here as a counterpart to Knuckles does make her seem a bit more of a natural pick, but it's not like that couldn't have been Blaze, who already has plenty of parallelisms and a dynamic with Knuckles, with her hover also being able to function as a glide.

 

This person is an enthusiast, not a developer. Apple's exclusivity deals tend to block all non-Apple platforms, so I don't think this is likely to be true.

 

Eh. Her proportions are much more toned down compared to SA2 and less emphasis is on her sex appeal, so I think she fits well enough.

 

Seems like an interesting game but considering we’ve only seen 30 seconds I can’t actually tell anything about this other than sonic is in it, it’s 3D, and you move around. For all we know this game could suck ass. If Sega’s recent output of sonic titles is anything to go by, I doubt people who lack the ability to play this will be waiting long for the next product. Sucks that the game is subscription only though. Can’t wait for nobody to ever be able to play this once apple pulls a google and abruptly ends support in 5-10 years.

 

I will say this once more.

If this were only on, say, the itunes store and only worked on apple hardware, I'd be highly annoyed, but not necessarily downright angry.

Locking this behind a subscription service is shady no matter what, and if you're defending it, you're defending a blatantly anti-consumer practice that many in the gaming community rightfully want to push back against.

I'm not here to shame you for buying the service, but don't act like something like this doesn't matter or isn't at least questionable. This community is founded on preservation and research. This practice is its polar opposite and reeks of "big publisher" energy.

If it gets ported later, good. Great. Dandy. That would at least be something.

STILL sets a bad precedent. Timed exclusivity locked into subscription services? Not a good thing at all. Funding for subscription exclusivity is a bad practice no matter who the publisher is or what "content" is allowed to be made. Maybe the game will be shallow and uninteresting like other mobile affairs, but I've seen a lot of positive reception for this concept, so they know its appeal.

And it's worse in this case because I know the Sonic fandom well enough to know this is being marketed at a demo that's more prone to being emotionally attached to adventure era nostalgia; they want to be catered too even more than us in the classic circles do, but that demo is slightly younger and ever so slightly less tech savvy than people here. What difference does that make? That also means, from a market research perspective, they're a little more susceptible to to predatory marketing practices.

That's really uncool, no matter how much SEGA has the right to do this with their IP.

And I've been burned in the mobile space a number of times. Sure, this skirts around some of the bad practices, but it's still not a good long term solution.

 

She's also been picked to feature in one of the upcoming LEGO sets, with Shadow and Knuckles also appearing. Definitely seems like they're pushing her as a major character for the first time in a long while.

 

"The second it comes out" is not what is being debated here. Why does this problem keep getting translated into something it isn't? This isn't like Colors Ultimate where you just had to install a kind of shitty launcher to buy it for a year. This is a game that, in all likelihood, may never come to other platforms, and could become totally inaccessible overall.

 

From what I understand, I should just play Sonic Shuffle instead to get my "Sonic & Friends in Dream Land" fix

 

Glad they're giving her attention, but it just seems weird to push only her. She doesn't really have much chemistry with Sonic as she does with Shadow.
Not like they have that much to choose from in the female side with the game cast. Amy, Rouge, Cream, and Blaze. Unless we want to bust out the shovel and dig up Tikal, Wave, Marine, Sticks, Vanilla, Lumina, Shade, Zeena, and Honey. + - If we really want to dig, we can always exhume Maria.  

 

It's okay, I don't blame you for forgetting Sonic '06 exists.

 

Rouge and Sonic are supposed to have a "manipulative thief girl vs street-savvy guy that can see through her tricks" dynamic, as shown in Sonic Battle and the Sonic Channel wallpaper cover stories.