So I'm not crazy for feeling that way. Seriously up here it felt impossible to find merch which was a nightmare for my mom buying birthday gifts. And if there was Sonic merch it was like $30 (Which in 2010 Canada was a decent amount) Now I see Sonic in every store and I envy modern kids with their availability of Sonic stuff.
The early 2010s were a confusing hellzone to be a casual Sonic fan. 14 years ago, I remember just coming out of a Walmart with my mom and decided to pick up a Archie Sonic issue. It was 216 and I remember my family going to the Tim Hortons to meet up with a few family friends on my mom's side so wanting to exercise my English (I wasn't exactly fluent in English then) I decided to sit down and read it while eating my donuts. And uh... to say I was confused would be a understatement. In front of me, there were all of these random ass characters that I had no idea what they were doing and what their whole deal was. I tried following Sonic as I had just played Unleashed but it just got more and more confusing. Baffled by what in God's name I was reading, I actually began stress crying and saying "This is too dumb, this is too dumb". One of my family friends took two photos in the Tim Hortons and I once saw them on Facebook: no joke, you could tell when I had just started reading and when I had finished the confusing mess that was put in front of me by the grimace I was making reading it. And that was the only Archie issue I could actually find in the stores: weeks later, I'd try finding another issue but there was never another one. That strange confusing plotline with the goofy ahh warluses and characters I never saw before stuck with me. Even after I went home with my limited knowledge and tried looking it up, things didn't get easier. What do you mean there's all of these comics? This synopsis doesn't make any sense! Who are these people? Why, how, why where, who, what? It was my first taste of the splintered mess that was the wider Sonic universe outside of the games. To 6 year old me this was like that dinosaur from Jurassic Park revealing its fucked up frills and spitting hot acid at me. The following years weren't that helpful. As I grew up and more of the games came out in a slightly sporadic pace (time's different as a kid) I only saw myself getting more and more confused trying to keep track of what was going on. And all the while there wasn't actually that much in terms of merch. I think I only saw... two? Four toys? I once got that Werehog pieced toy in a egg of which he lost his head so I had a Headless Hog for a few years but that was it. The only things in my presence were the games themselves, which only got more mystifying and confusing as the years went on. By the time Forces came out and the whole "irony" thing became common I kind of checked out and stuck to the classic games. It's only quite recently did I try and revisit in more detail the period of Sonic games that I missed out on, but when I was living through them it was as eldritch as it could get and I wonder if other kids had the same experience of being utterly confused on what nightmare they were looking at.
We didn't have many Sonic toys when I was really little, but I remember them suddenly being EVERYWHERE starting in the late 2000s, and to my memory it's been that way ever since. I do think a number of these were Toys R Us exclusives, so maybe if you didn't have one of those around...? Props to 2009 Metal Sonic though, I adored that thing.
We actually did have a Toys R Us in Canada but it was oddly quite pricey for kid me. I rarely got anything from there.
tbh I honestly thought this would be about the discussion on twitter right now about how just, shamelessly vitriolic even professional news outlets like IGN were about Sonic games at this time. It gave me the same vibe as the FFXIV director going "yeah, people used JRPG as a pejorative" - the initial reaction of "YEAH I REMEMBER THAT" followed by the gap of years having me go "but was it really?" followed by being gutpunched by someone posting a clip from xplay of the hosts literally saying "then we nuked them twice and they became a real country". it was less intense for me this time around because I was 100% checked out of 3D Sonic games (Generations a couple years back was the first 3D Sonic game I played since Heroes released, and Frontiers is the first one since Heroes that I've actually managed to clear), but, yeah, seeing a clip from an IGN review going "Escape from the City makes me want to kill myself" and "if you like Sonic music...why?" was definitely a "oh. yeah. it really was like that" moment for me.
Japanese Xenophobia was crazy in that time. No shocked Sonic was catching strays being somewhat Japanese adjacent
Eh I don't think all this was due to xenophobia. Moreso just the natural consequence of early millenial SNES fanboys being handed a megaphone to talk about Sonic.
I don't think 5993 attributing this mess entirely to xenophobia. It definitely did have some factor, especially with western press media though. Other legacy franchises at the time would get pot shots thrown at them. Mega Man was another franchise catching strays.
Generations and Mania are labelled as "uninspired" just because they reuse levels from older games, but I'd say both do a great job at renewing and, dare I say it, elevate most them. The idea of reusing stages itself seems to be what get people's attention, but the only times I feel like they weren't doing anything interesting with it was in Forces and Frontiers I don't want to throw 2000s Sonic Team under the bus, but at least in regards to the levels themselves, there's very little I'd call "creative" in most games between Adventure and Unleashed. Not to dismiss any of the (admittedly valid) criticism, but it's hard for me to get too bothered by Green Hill and Chemical Plant being overused in the 2010s when 2/3 of their appearances still felt unique in their own ways and the alternative is having a bunch of generic realistic urban cities and other ugly stuff that I'd prefer to not be part of the standard look of the series
Playing through Sonic Mania, most of the time I found myself wishing I was playing through the original levels instead. I did not enjoy most of the changes. The only one that gets my seal of approval is what they did with act 2 of Oil Ocean. That was a neat gimmick. Plus the oil catching on fire because of the Fire Shield/Barrier made a lot of sense.
That trio alone makes it hard to beat, I agree. But I do think the bright spots of the 2000s often go completely overshadowed by how dark the dark spots were, and the resulting discourse we've got nowadays over whether or not they even *were* dark spots. Setting aside the mainline decline, the 2000s still had some fantastic stuff. All three Advance games were a good time, Rush was a blast, and Rush Adventure is still one of the most overlooked and under-appreciated games in the series. I do think mainline Sonic got a lot better in the early 2010s, but the seeds of that recovery, right down to their light-hearted tone and gameplay mechanics, were planted in the 2000s-era spinoffs. Who knows? Maybe once we get 2000s nostalgia out of our system, we'll see history repeat itself with Dream Team's style feeding into the mainline.
Relevant to this topic, Sonic Boom has been finding a new lease of life on Netflix - it was viewed for nearly 87 million hours cumulatively last year
So even seasons can be region-locked on Netflix? Because, no, here in Belgium the second season isn't available.
It's also available on Brazil, even though we barely got half of season 1's episodes on television (and the first 4 of season 2, which also got a different dub from the Netflix version for some reason)
If there's one thing I might add regarding this topic: If you are somehow under the impression that the 2020s are somehow distantly removed from the 2010s in both time and culture, then you are way too young for me to take your opinion on anything seriously.
I hate to break it to you but as a 20 year old I was only 6 in 2010 and I can confirm that the 2010s are very distantly removed from the 2020s. Look no further than TheLegend27 or coughing in public.
I'm older than 20 and comparing the early 2010s to the early 2020s feels like comparing different aeons, especially in the political realm (which, obviously, affects culture). Your mileage may vary depending on where you live, of course.