Yeah it just feels forced and disingenuous for a character like Sonic to not have any female admirers despite having plenty of male admirers. But I guess we need to stick it to Minnie Mouse, a character who's also somehow bad because she likes the really cool main character...
I forget that "admirer" only and exclusively means when you have a big boner for someone. Please excuse my slightly loose use of the word.
They already did change her whole character. Modern Amy is way closer to what she had in the Adventure games, especially SA2, than most of what came after in Heroes or 06 or god forbid Sonic Battle. I admit it's not exactly the same but it comes across far more as correcting course than setting a new one. One of the best Amy scenes is when she breaks Sonic out of Prison Island. Sonic wants info on Shadow, she goes "marry me and I'll tell you", and he's like "no" and she's like "darn, anyway here's the scoop". And that's it! Casual little banter between friends. Amy nowadays may not bring up her thing for Sonic quite so directly, but this totally could come from that character. If it were the weirdo from Battle or Heroes, she wouldn't even open the cell without hearing a yes.
I wouldn't really say that. For one, Amy in the Adventure games wasn't even really treated as part of the team and treated more like a tagalong. She very much was just someone who bumbled into the conflict by just doing her own thing and needed to be bailed out by Sonic or Tails. Could you ever possibly a imagine a scene like this happening to Modern Amy? Where its explicitly said in the text that she's NOT a damsel anymore? The main difference here between the subsequent games is that she's not physically or verbally abusive, which fair, that's definitely bad. But the general characteristics of Amy before is that she wasn't as a capable as the boys, but still tried her hardest despite that and it's what made her turning Gamma and Shadow stand out more. It's the whole punchline of her role in SA2 in particular; the entire joke is that she complains how nobody takes her seriously and leave her behind and her being taken hostage almost got Sonic killed, yet she's ultimately the one who convinces Shadow to change his ways, simply by being herself. I just can't see that happening with Modern Amy, whose more likely to just be thrown onto the frontlines and treated as just another powerhouse fighter. Now to give credit, Classic Amy kind of still has that as shown with Trip in Superstars and even in the IDW comics. Which just makes it all the more perplexing why Modern Amy doesn't get any of that.
But if you're on Gamecube like most people who played SA2 you can just switch to the multiplayer mode where she's just as capable as the boys. I think in that situation in particular she just figured it'd be a bad idea to try to disarm the man pointing a gun at her head, which is smart. She only even got into that situation because of Sonic and Tails' negligence. Just doesn't feel fair to put the Crazy Gadget situation on Amy when I'm not even sure that's what the game was implying.
Have you ever seen a toy section in a department store these days? Or have you seen how well the Sonic movies performed? (I highly doubt it was mostly adults going to see the movie as all three times I've seen them they've been mainly children in the theater) I mean Sonic isn't as popular among kids nowadays as Fortnite and Minecraft and he's not as popular as his peak in the 90s obviously, but there are still plenty of children out there that like Sonic. I see kids wearing Sonic shirts fairly often as well.
I think this has been a really solid discussion about Amy. I think something that's kinda missing here, though, is not about how she changed, but about how her relationships to other characters changed. As a kid I got a kick out of the Sonic & Amy dynamic. No, it wasn't a shipping thing, it was because it seemed like the only things Sonic was ever afraid of were water and Amy's affection. Evil scientist? Piece of cake. City crushing monster? No problem. Universe-ending catastrophe? Just another Tuesday. ...This one girl who has a crush on me? Terrifying. It brought out a different side of the main character that we don't really see anymore. I know, it wasn't that much deeper than "Ewww, cooties!", but it was a part of both characters. I think the recent changes to Amy are implying that she's holding back her feelings because she KNOWS it makes Sonic uncomfortable. I think there's more they could do with that, but it might not be something SEGA wants to dwell on, so it's gently hinted at periodically and generally sidelined.
No, I can't see Amy having an interaction of this type like she did with Gamma or Shadow, because no character like them has existed for her to share such a scene with. IDW has some analogous sequences, but Amy has been stuck on the periphery of the series since the Adventure era anyway. Whether the character herself is actually capable of bringing that sincerity has nothing to do with it. As for her being less dead weight than before...sure, I can accept that's a difference between her Adventure self and now. But I'd as much accept that as character growth due to how the situation has evolved (yeah yeah that makes her role in the new classic games more suspect, I don't care). I think the issue is that when I hear something like "Modern Sonic writing is too bland", I'm comparing it to the embarrasing mess I grew up with, where the good parts of the Adventure stories are a footnote. Not only do I disagree, I would readily take whatever that idea of "bland" is over the feeling of both bored and stupid that I got from your oh-sixes and your Shadows and what have you. Also, recency bias is in total effect here, because if there's one thing I remember about Lost World and Forces's stories, it was not that they were so lifeless and devoid of interactions that people had nothing to argue about for hundreds of pages.
Fun fact I think is worth noting, my bestest friend in the whole wide world actually kind of prefers the Pontaff stories to something like Frontiers. He'd rather have a bad story to laugh at than one that bores him to no end and makes him feel hollow.
You should slowly pull off his fingers one at a time. That will be the most interesting part of his day for sure, and very funny to me personally.
One thing I always find a bit curious is how Adventure fans (SA1 fans in particular) always act like Sonic Adventure is some super momentum based game like the classics, and the boost ruins this by instantly taking Sonic to his top speed. But didn't the spin dash in SA1 achieve the same thing if you think about it. If you wanted to go as fast as possible in Sa1 you will be spam-dashing throughout the entire level, so in that sense the SA1 spamdash serves as a more jank and unwieldy boost (since you're constantly going from top speed to slightly slower to top speed again). If by "momentum" they mean slope physics, the boost games still technically have that (aside from Frontiers kinda. If Frontiers even counts as a boost game, plus they added the spindash so idk) even if they're not nearly as busted in favor of the player as SA1. I do like SA1 quite a bit actually, but I have no idea where the "It's so momentum based" idea came from.
I was speaking more along the lines of putting current Amy into those same exact scenarios as back then. Sure, I'd accept it as character growth if that's what it actually was. Amy didn't go through a journey of growth and development to become who she is, they just one day decided that she's not going to chase after Sonic anymore and just made her another part of his friend group with Tails and Knuckles. You yourself just admitted that this change is incongruent with how she was actually depicted in the Classic Era, and it's something Sega just wants everyone to gloss over and forget about it. It's all but an admission that old Amy was so terrible that she needed to be "fixed" to be more "acceptable" as opposed to just embracing her better character traits and accepting her flaws for what they are. Like I said, I understand why people prefer this change and recognize my opinion is the minority here, but it just makes the whole thing ring hollow to me personally and why I can't really bring myself to care. Amy was never one of my favorites but I accepted that and just took her for what she was and appreciated the moments where she did shine. She's more broadly appealing nowadays, but there's not really much for me to care about her anymore besides just being another hero who can smash robots in a series where most of the cast can already do that. And bear in mind, this change has occurred for ten years now, because they started focusing less on her Sonic crush and more on her heroic traits as far back as Sonic Boom, 2014. We're only talking about it more now because Frontiers is the first game to give her a major supporting role with this new incarnation since then. It's not even like I think its all bad either; like I said, I like how she's depicted in the Classic IDW comics and in the visual novel. She's allowed to make mistakes and be a little bratty, but still has tons of heroic moments. So it's not like I'm asking for her to go back to being verbally and physically abusive, just show that she's got some spunk to not take anyone's shit, even Sonic's, but isn't afraid to express how she feels and that she's always willing to step up even if she lacks the power to make a difference like Sonic can. @Lambda said it best. There's just something endearing how the usual calm and cool Sonic can handle any enemy that comes his way, but buckles towards a girl's sincere feelings for him. That, to me, just sounds like a much more interesting dynamic than the two of them just being friends with vaguely defined feelings for each other.
If you want to spam it, you need to be good at it. Or it will only make you zigzag around. Boosting doesn't require "skilful play", only the press of a button. Plus, levels are way more automated. SA1 is a wonderful but janky game. Imagine a remake with a more experienced team behind it ...
I don't think the difference between how momentum is handled in the Adventure and Boost games necessarily has to do with how fast Sonic can go fast, but rather what you can do with that speed. With SA1's spin dash and a nice innocuous little slope, I can shoot up to the top of Pleasure Castle in a few seconds. With the Unleashed/Generations boost, I'm just engaging with the game normally. I'm going fast down the inescapable hallway, with the only sequence breaking being allowed in specifically-allocated forks in the hallway. It's just not the same. The spam dash is even less similar with how secondary and hard-to-abuse it is. I wasn't even aware of it on my first playthrough. To be fair SA1 still has its fair share of automation and SA2's speed staged even already kinda have said hallway problem. Heroes and 06 (lol) had relative openness in some of their levels but the Unleashed boost formula forced that all away entirely. I guess you're right in that official 3D Sonic pretty much always over-prioritized speed over platforming but the spirit's still there in the Adventure games in a way that feels completely (and intentionally) absent in the boost games.
