I watched Sonic X years ago, the only thing I remember is that Rouge and a short haired cop girl had lesbian moments or something along those lines
I'd like to be optimistic and interpret that as the GUN soldier being in a sort of state of denial- saying when they took her away he meant her body but didn't have the heart to accept that he killed her. Definitely not 4kids intention, but I'd like to believe.
Ah, yes. Who can forget Amy the Mood Maker? Lol. I do like the pilot but I think a lot of that is just because the animation quality is way higher. Not a fan of anthros personally, but I'm in complete agreement if they were humans like the games. Though neither the pilot, actual X, the movies, Prime, or anything else will ever touch the OVA in my opinion. If I could have one Sonic wish, it'd be that the OVA caught on. I think we'd have seen a completely different trajectory for the series if Japanese audiences actually responded well to that.
I recently bought Colors and am playing through it for the first time whenever I get the opportunity. Haven't beat the game yet, nor gone for red rings and stuff yet. But I must say I do not at all see what's wrong with this games 2D gameplay. There are some moments where it's basically a really slow auto scroller, and that's annoying. But outside of that, no.
That's definitely something I noticed the last time I watched it. It goes away in Series 2, but I don't really understand what they were going for with it in the first place. It's not like it makes things look more cartoony, and it wasn't in the pilots...
I bounced off it hard on release but grew to love it like 5 years back after deciding to 100% it. They were really, really clever with how the levels were designed around using the wisps to get red rings. Going for them was the real "a-ha moment" for me. I 100% the PS4 release in 2 days and I play Egg Shuttle on my Series X pretty frequently despite the port's issues. That said, I've yet to watch the cutscenes lol. The writing was just so bad to me I skipped everything. I have no clue what the story of Colors or Lost World are about beyond the basic story beats I've picked up from YouTubers.
Back before I started interacting with the online community beyond watching Youtube videos like Sonic Shorts and stuff, in other words before I became extremely jaded and cynical towards this series and it's fanbase, I used to regularly watch and rewatch the stories on Youtube. They called the cutscene compilations "movies." With some games, that is still the only way I have experienced their stories, despite getting them for myself. Because when I later actually got some of those games, I started skipping everything. For example, I have yet to watch either Adventure games story to completion on my own, despite having beaten both and 100% the first. (I want to 100% SA2 as well, or at least 98% it. I have no interest in the chao garden. But the console I was playing both games on does not work as well as I want it to and when I bought the games for pc, I found that my computer not being updated right prevented me from getting .NET Framework 3.5, an issue I am too lazy to resolve) I would say Sonic Colors is one of such games, as I have skipped every cutscene so far. But honestly I never even bothered to watch it's story back then. I guess even then I had no interest and recognized how terrible it is.
the discussion about like, Sonic's writing leaning too more towards the shitty western cartoons is hilarious to me after the last main series game literally had, and was largely praised for, Super Saiyan Hedgehog Fighting Evangelions. that is easily The Most Shonen Concept that Sonic has had since SA2. obviously like, gameplay concept and writing concept tend to be dissimilar but acting like Sonic is less shonen because a western writer is at the helm strikes me as a falsehood in light of Frontiers going "fuck it, here's 4x worth the shonen Sonic Adventure had"
Imitating tropes of and making references to other media does not equal capturing the appeal of that media.
see like, Sonic zipping around the map, flying through the air doing tricks, doing cool moves at enemies, captures the essence of early Sonic for me too tho. when Frontiers first came out someone here had described it as "the Sonic CD intro simulator" and I totally agree with it. basically, the point I was trying to make is that if Ian Flynn's work is pushing Sonic away from the "original" feel, then he's doing a bad job of doing so given that the game itself finally seemed to grasp it in a way that no game after SA2 had for me.
What I just said reminded me of something else. This is not an unpopular opinion. Or at least, it shouldn't be an unpopular opinion. But I think it is. You don't have to experience 100% of something in order to be able to form and give a valid opinion on it. At least, not in all cases. I did not like Sonic Adventure very much after the initial glow wore off. But I decided to go ahead and complete as much of it as possible to see if my opinion would change, see if I could figure out what people love about the game so much. I even dedicated myself to the whole, "spamdash and spindash jump and skip literally everything" playstyle for a good bit. Maybe I could see it if I just kept at it. The only thing that has changed between my thoughts on the game at first and my thoughts on the game after 100% it (near 100%. just remembered I never even bothered to attempt Big's A missions after the horror stories I heard. Nor am I touching the chao garden) is that I became marginally, slightly less opposed to alternate playstyles and hub worlds on principle. And even that did not last very long, and even then I still strongly preferred not having those. So basically, I wasted my time playing a game I honestly kind of hated for... No reason at all, really.
Several shots, such as that wine shot, were kept as the edited 4kids version by mistake. They used the 4kids version as the base and replaced footage with other sources as necessary, which in my opinion was a bad system to follow. The Japanese DVD source is good quality and could have been used as the base of the pre-metarex episodes, only replacing stuff that was altered in those DVDs. That would have prevented this kind of 4kids goof right at the start.
Whether or not something 'resembles the franchise's original feel' is an incredibly subjective thing so I think debating about it as if it's an objective thing is a fool's errand. In my personal opinion, I don't feel like the franchise has ever really strayed away from the core of Sonic. No matter how shitty the game, or poorly thought out the idea, all of the mainline titles (things like Boom notwithstanding) still feel like Sonic to me. That's just what I think, though.
I don't know. I think it's very, very easy to see how SA2 doesn't resemble the series' original feel. Even if you feel that SA2 captures everything that was critical to the series original identity, look at it from another perspective. Take S1 as the "original". It's about one woodland creature saving his other woodland feature friends from an evil human turning animals into animal robots and polluting the natural, total fantasy world they live in. Then you look at SA2, and it deals with government and military conspiracies and artificial lifeform on quest for vengeance that threatens to see the entire world (which is now basically an exaggerated version of earth) being blown up. The gameplay too should be obvious, with things like the mech shooting being a million miles from what Sonic was to begin with. Sonic has changed a lot more than most other franchises do. But that said, I think that there was a really very natural (if not bold) progression of the series from S1 through to SA1. SA2 was the first time that it shifted gear hard, but even it isn't that far removed from SA1 in a lot of ways. The problem is how all those changes resonated with the audience. I don't think it's difficult to understand why some people may only like certain branches of the franchise, Classic, Modern or otherwise, and why others duck in and out of the franchise through its changes. Sonic is always Sonic to me these days, but there was a time when I was younger and only had the ability to read about then-new games online without getting the chance to play them. SA2 made me angry. It simply wasn't Sonic. He was running away from the military in San Francisco? Sod that. No, Heroes looked like a real Sonic game to me whilst SA2 had lost the fucking plot. I've changed my tune now though. SA2 represents some of the best that the series has to offer. It's not perfect, but its damn good. I like Sonic in part for how unique the franchise is. That encompasses a huge variety of games. Tomb Raider fans are in a pretty similar boat...
I don't know if Hero story is that divergent from what came before. You're basically just stopping Eggman from destroying the world and I was already running from police robots in a pseudo-realistic city in Speed Highway. I don't think it's particularly out of character for a guy who uses small animals as batteries to point a gun at a little girl's head, nor threaten the president when he stands in the way of Eggmanland. IDK I think it's fine. It's the Dark and Final story where the tone starts to get messy but that was at least clearly intentional to contrast the two sides of the story.
I think that was just Eggman making his mechs look like police robots. They have animals, don't they? Though I generally agree. Going immediately from Sonic 1 to SA2 will give some tonal whiplash, but nothing seemed strange to me as a kid progressing from 1, to 2, 3K, SA, and then SA2.
