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

When I was quite young, I would play Mega Collection and SA2B.
On the other hand, while I do quite like S3&K and SA2, my personal favorite, despite remembering nothing but faint recollections of one of the first cutscenes, is Heroes.
In fact, that faint recollection is what got me back into Sonic, as I decided to play Classic Heroes due to seeing Espio, Vector and Charmy as being tip-of-the-tongue oddly familiar.

I haven't really had a chance to play any of the modern games, though. Perhaps I'll buy the next game.

 

Are you trolling here? Not only are you putting words in a lot of people's mouths, but you're quite stating the opposite of what most people who took part in this topic are saying. The only one who actually sounded close to what you're saying, Overlord, got quite a backfire for doing it. By saying that, you're being part of the problem instead of pointing at it.

 

To provide my perspective on the matter:

I was born in 1995. The gamecube was the first game console I ever owned, unless handheld systems count, in which case the GBA was the first (a few months before the gamecube, I think). SA2B was one of the first games I ever played at all (the first one ever would have been F-Zero Maximum Velocity on the GBA--unsurprisingly, racing games are my favorite genre and F-Zero GX is one of my favorite games of all time ^^). In fact, I do not remember actually getting the game. I just always had it. I don't really remember being a Sonic fan or asking my parents for it, I think they just got it for me because Sonic was popular with kids.

I got it, I played it. I also remember having Gems Collection. Maybe Mega Collection, but my memory that far back is very hazy and hard to recall. I do distinctly remember never really playing the old genesis games though. In fact when I think "old Sonic games on my gamecube", I remember...Fighters? I really didn't actually play those games much lol

I was a Sonic fan, though. I made Sonic OC's on deviantart, chatted with the very young part of the fandom. Retro existed at the time, but that side of the fandom was effectively an entirely different crowd. It was not that I disliked places like this because they were mean to my favorite Sonic games, or felt inferior or superior to them. It was more I wasn't even aware that side of the fandom existed. Truth be told, I don't think the Sonic fandom actually was one cohesive whole until the 2010's. Before then, the young 3D fans and the older 2D fans were just two different things. If the split doesn't exist now, it sure as heck did back then.

I was like, in my late teens until I saw an actual SEGA console in the wild. The Dreamcast only existed as this mythical thing grandpas in the video gaming community would get misty-eyed over. I'm pretty sure I didn't even know what a Saturn fucking was until I was like 17. I didn't know the Master System existed until like, no joke, two years ago.

As for the Sonic games, I had a weirdly uneven history with them. I definitely never got Heroes as a kid, though I played it through rentals and even back then I thought it sucked ass. I rented Shadow too and remembering unironically loving the fuck out of it because it was edgy as hell and my 11-year-old self though that was the coolest thing ever, lmao. I didn't play 06 until years after it came out--I played Unleashed before then and loved it to death and remember crying at the ending. Despite having a wii, I never played Colors, Secret Rings, or Black Knight, so my age-groups recent newfound love for the third game there is utterly lost on me.

I was FAR more consistent on the handheld front. I had all three Sonic Advance games, played Sonic Battle to death (and cried like a little girl at the ending), and also played the hell out of Sonic Rush (never played the sequel, or any handheld Sonic game after that to be frank). I think I got Chronicles too but I didn't like the game (wow, surprise).

I fell out of Sonic after Colors came out. I got Generations and liked it a lot, but I didn't have a Wii U so Boom and Lost World just passed me by. I didn't become a really hardcore Sonic fan again until I became friends with an artist who WAS and Mania got revealed, frankly.

I guess what I'm saying here is that while the whole idea that there are three sharply-separated "generations" of Sonic fans is probably not true these days...it was back then. Kid me had nothing in common with the userbase of this site. We just didn't. We were effectively two separate things. Then people of my generation grew up, began filtering into places like this, and two sides of the fandom basically merged into at least having some kind of common ground.

I really cannot stress enough: in those childish deviantart communities of Sonic OC creators and the like in 2002-2006, the classic games all but didn't exist. No one debated things like momentum physics or level design. Sonic Adventure 2 being "the best Sonic game" was so assumed to be correct that no one really said that, we just all knew it to be true. Everything before that game effectively did not exist at all. Classic Sonic was a thing we knew about, but it was this separate "old" thing that we had no connection to. If those kids were transplanted to a few years ago, then none of them would have given a single shit about Mania's reveal. I know I wouldn't have in the slightest, unlike the older me when the game actually was revealed. If y'all tried to talk to those kids and me, we literally would have had NOTHING to discuss, and both spend the entire time utterly confused by why the other people care about this thing we had no connection to.

Compare that to now when even an "Adventure kid" like me got hype over Mania and wants a sequel. The fandom is now actually a big tent fandom, not two separate tents that are effectively two different fandoms. People still prefer different eras, but I think in general we can see the good traits in eras other than our own.

 

I mean, just to drive the point even further home that this isn't entirely an age thing:

One of my best friends is only two years older than you, @Frostav, and he did grow up with a Genesis and a Dreamcast. His preferences on the series are pretty well a match for mine.

I think what you're describing existed as early as 1998, as a divide between the gameplay/mechanics crowd that grew around the hacking/modding scene, and the more character-focused crowd that was initially focused squarely on SatAM. Around 2000-2001, there was a certain balance between these two sets. I knew people who were active with SFGHQ and The Moogle Cavern and SWS2B and a shipping board called Sonic to Emi No Ai. Everyone didn't know everyone, but everyone was aware of all the major community hubs. But as the reputation of the series tanked among the older crowd throughout the 2000s, and games like SA2 Battle picked up new fans, these groups had less and less cross-over, to put it mildly. In fact, a major topic of conversation by the mid-2000s was that Sega was ruining the series in a misguided attempt to appeal to "the kiddies" and that the correct course of action would be to cater to "older fans" instead, like they apparently had until Sonic Adventure.

I mean, it's not hard to find fans in the 2000s saying word-for-word what young fans say now, and the only difference is which era they're talking about.

 

This was in another thread, not here.

 

If only he waited a few years to say that when Colours & Lost World came out, with Iizuka even going on record saying that those games were meant for more Nintendo-centric audiences.

It's gonna be wild imagining what bogeyman Forces fans are gonna come up with to explain why the series inevitably won't pander to them in the future.

 

Sonic is a "Mario game", and has been since Day 1.

The actual worst thing about Sonic Discourse might be this whole "in 1991, Sonic changed the game by inventing Momentum-Based-Platforming™ to defeat Mario!" narrative. It's bizarre and utterly ahistorical. Have these people never played a 2D Mario game? Do they just use words like "momentum" with absolutely zero regard for what they actually mean? Are the absolute wealth of mechanical resemblances between the two series actually this lost on people?

 

There's quite a few differences to be sure. Sure, there's some element of momentum from SMB1 onwards, but not to the degree that Sonic had, which is the point people are trying to make.

More importantly to the topic, Sonic shouldn't strive to be exactly like a Mario game or cater to Mario Fans. Sonic as a franchise is its own thing and chasing after the tropes of Mario like was done in Lost world, and to a lesser extent Colors, has turned out games that weren't as well-received when they tried to do their own thing.

 

Sonic games are built on a robust physics system that emphasizes the character's ability to roll like a marble, as well as use the shape of the terrain to great advantage, much more so than in a classic Mario platformer. Playing a Sonic game does not feel like playing a Mario game. Loops wouldn't be a thing if Sonic gameplay was mechanically identical to Mario gameplay.

The word "momentum" is just something people latched onto as an easy descriptive term to refer to the mechanics that make Sonic gameplay unique compared to other platformers. i.e. being able to build momentum as you traverse a stage to a very high max speed that is not reached simply by pressing a run button or holding right, with the character retaining that momentum if input on the gamepad stops.

Sonic gameplay may have mechanical similarities to Mario, but acting as if Sonic made no technical feats and was simply stealing Mario's bit is a shallow reading of how Sonic gameplay functions.

 

Classic Mario gameplay doesn't make use of momentum nearly as extensively as Sonic, nor is it built around ball rolling physics. It doesn't require you to use the terrain and slopes to build up speed and overcome upward slopes. It doesn't have you running/rolling downhill at breakneck speed, or pinballing around in areas filled with springs, bumpers and pinball flippers. Mario allows you to reach max speed immediately by holding the run button, and keeps your speed uniform afterwards.

 

Not nitpicking to argue here, but we have to be clear about the importance of momentum in SMB1 gameplay, which is what inspired a lot of Sonic 1's design decisions.

In SMB1, Mario has to heavily counteract his momentum to come to a stop, and this affects the way players have to approach platforming. Compared to later Mario titles, the platforming in SMB1 isn't as tight, and players who want to conserve their speed have anticipate platforms to land on at a distance from where they jumped. Slowing down to cut your jump short and land on a nearer platform feels like it takes effort because of the time it takes Mario to do so. It's really comparable to what platforming feels like in Sonic 1, at least when it's on flat surfaces.

Sonic still feels vastly different from early Mario with the ability to roll and the game's use of sloped terrain, quarter pipes, half pipes, and loops, but we shouldn't dabble in extremes here. They're different games, but they have lots of little things in common in their game feel and design. I mean, bar none, Sonic 1 wouldn't exist without SMB1 to give Yuji Naka the idea to build a platformer around the kind of play emerging from players of SMB1 at the time: playing and game-overing over and over, eventually blasting through the early levels from having internalized every beat from playing them so much.

 

Mario & Sonic are both platformers. While the specific details about them are what make them different, its really not wrong to say they're cut from the cloth.

Because ya know....they are.

Sonic borrows from Mario as much as vice versa, and that's fine because franchises aping ideas from each other and putting their own spin on it isn't really a new concept, nor should it be something to be looked down upon.

 

This simply isn't true. Sonic has borrowed a lot more from Mario. It's a struggle to think of anything Mario has borrowed from Sonic.

 

I could see someone try to make a case for Odyssey's rolling, but rolling has been so heavily downplayed in 3D Sonic I don't think it should count.

 

Its a stretch, but I don't really think its a coincidence that both Sonic and Mario games from 2001-2002 featured a game where both characters have been framed by a doppelganger and have to clear their name.

And thr aforementioned Odyssey, which aside from the rolling, has a similar aesthetic to a Sonic Adventure game. It even has developers who worked on Unleashed.

Even recently as Bowser's Fury has drawn comparisons to Sonic Adventure.


I know Mario is the king of gaming and all, and Sonic was designed to combat that, Mario isn't really above aping designs from other franchises either

 

A few Mario games have drawn comparisons to Sonic in the past, like Yoshi's Island (the "you drop objects upon getting hit and can grab them back" health system and the few 360º wall-running sections) or Odyssey (the rolling and the "cartoony game character in a realistic urban environment with more realistic humans" aesthetics).

 

Yes. This is the novel addition to Mario's gameplay that Naka made in his creation of "an action game to challenge Mario". But...

...it absolutely does! Not 100%, obviously. But things can be very similar without being identical.

Naka didn't write down "an action game to challenge Pole Position". He didn't write down "an action game to challenge Double Dragon". Nor did he specify some slower paced platformers like Castlevania or Mega Man. He was specifically wanting to create a Mario-like.

I'm not saying they're identical. Maybe that's how "Sonic is a Mario game" came across, so that may have been a poor choice of words on my part. I meant to say more that Sonic is a "Mario-like", in the same way that Guilty Gear is a "Street Fighter-like" or Hexen is a "Doom-like". If we want to treat "Momentum-Based Platformers" as a category or a genre, and place Sonic within it, then Sonic did not codify the genre. A rolling ball does have momentum, but not all things with momentum involve rolling balls. In Donkey Kong, Mario has no momentum. In Mario Bros., there's a wee bit: it takes a sec to come to a complete stop and/or switch directions. But compared to either of these, Super Mario Bros. is fast.

Building up speed, having a variable jump height and distance based on the length of time the jump button is held down and how much of a running start you have, being able to "steer" yourself in the air to influence where you land, crouching on slopes to slide down them, crouching while running to slide, holding the jump button while landing on an enemy to ricochet high into the air, and even transitioning from running on the ground to the wall (basically running up a quarter pipe, in 2D) were all features of Mario's moveset, developed gradually over time, before Sonic came onto the scene.

One can point to all of the ways Sonic built upon this, and I'll agree that it's great. But it's also precisely my point. Mario fast. Sonic faster. Mario slide. Sonic roll. etc

It's also not for nothing that a basic critique of Marble and Labyrinth Zone is that they're too much like "Mario"/"traditional platforming" levels, a criticism which seems at odds with itself. Sonic 1 might seem like a "transitional" game nowadays, but it's not like it wouldn't still be fun and distinctive Mario-clone if it never got any sequels.

I'm aware. I've been one of them for years. It was an effective talking-point when attempting simply to contrast with the basic movement of later Sonic games. Just like "Pinball Physics" in the Sonic 4 days. After a while, though, it becomes less a shorthand for a more sophisticated argument, and more a stand-in for one. There's no "one word" that will sum up the things that Sonic added to Mario's working formula. My best attempt to break it down to as few words as possible is "Super Mario + Pinball + Vert Skateboarding", but even that just invites further elaboration and clarification.

A lot of people spend so much of their time trying to "crack the code" of what Sonic games have really been doing wrong since Sonic 3 & Knuckles. And the analysis too often frames Sonic as "the polar opposite of Mario", reading like people still hopped up on corporate driven early 90's console war hype. I'm still clicking on Sonic video essays made in the last year or so that can't think of much to say about how Mario relates to Sonic's origins beyond "they made a mascot to get that M A R K E T S H A R E".*
*Which isn't untrue obviously, but we're not talking about fucking sales charts, we're talking about games. Play. Fun. Artificial agencies. A specific artform and medium. How real world necessity informed the evolution of the medium is absolutely fascinating in its own right, but there are conversations where it's relevant, and conversations where it isn't. If we're talking about gameplay mechanics being taken from one series and placed into another, then it's clear what's going to be relevant to that and what's not.

When it's much more productive to think about what makes games fun in general, and what kinds of games were doing similar things to Sonic, before Sonic started doing them in its own way. It's genuinely enlightening to understand what gameplay mechanics were available at the time, and what was done with them given their limitations.

Also, yeah, Mario takes from other games, too. The most salient example to me personally being how Joust and Balloon Fight informed design decisions in Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros.

tl;dr

People need to understand what made Sonic 1 so good in the first place, to understand what made Sonic 3 so good in the first place, in order to understand why Adventure and Unleashed, and the games that took from them, are seen as "bad" by comparison. But to understand what made Sonic 1 so good requires understanding what made Super Mario Bros. so good. And far from "not bothering to do it", the very idea seems to have not crossed very many minds!


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Sorry! I know that's a lot of "line by line quoting" which comes off kinda rude I think, but I'm not trying to be abrasive or take the thread deep into other waters or anything. Also not trying to put any words in peoples mouths! Just trying to put into words what's been getting under my skin regarding The Discourse for honestly years at this point. It probably didn't need to result in me writing a wall of text, so I apologize. I don't have nearly as much time these days to sit and write and edit my writing as thoroughly as I used to, so I'm not fully sure how well I communicated my points.

 

Playing Sonic feels like playing a Mario game? So you play Sonic games by grabbing Fire Flowers and shooting fireballs at enemies? You play Mario by speeding through slopes, walls and loops at breakneck speed and rolling through enemies?

There is a difference between taking inspiration from another game and being a clone. A clone is a game that closely copies another without adding any significant changes, like the original Giana Sisters. Sonic 1 doesn't do that. It forgoes a major aspect of classic SMB (the powerups) and focuses on and expands on another (the momentum-based gameplay, even implementing actual physics).

 

One thing I've always hated in life is when people know my age or even what I look like, they'll stick me under a generational umbrella and make assumptions about what I like or don't like based on the time when I was born, which I nor anyone else really has a say in.

I'm probably kind of an odd one out as a fan of a lot of older games and media because I actually don't look back on my childhood fondly and it's a period in my life I don't really like to remember. I guess I see a lot of media from those times as something I wish I could have enjoyed then but couldn't due to my situation, and even the stuff I did have I feel I didn't really appreciate until later in my life, probably due to lack of competence when I was young and delayed psychological development. I'm glad I'm a more stable independent adult now and try to catch up on some things I missed when I wasn't one.

Anyway, that being said I try my best to base my judgement on the media itself, and decide whether I like it or not with who I am now.
Of course there is nothing wrong with being nostalgic (I think I am too, but maybe in a different way?) and it's natural to feel a bias for something associated with fond memories, it just gets annoying when people judge only based on their bias and nothing else, and assume it on other people they don't know.

 

This is a really strange argument to make in response to someone saying, explicitly, "[playing Mario is] not 100% [like playing Sonic], obviously." You're misrepresenting the actual points being talked here, which is more akin to "Sonic's controls and physics have Mario DNA in them because SMB1, especially at the time, was the ur platformer."