I mean even without the movies I think this sort of brand consolidation was the inevitable result of Sega looking at the Archie comic series, going "WTF?" and stepping in to exert a significantly stronger creative control. If anything the movies have stuck out for their lack of wider continuity and visual consistency in an era where Sega's actually been using the comics as a jumping-off point for both their service games (i.e., Tangle and Whisper in Dash), new titles, and reference books -- especially given the fact that they've basically made Ian Flynn and Tyson Hesse the primary brand ambassadors at this point.
I've been playing Sonic since the day Sonic 1 was released (I was a huge Bonk fan before that). I never thought the idea of the game was about speed. I never paid attention to advertisments. I didn't care about that. It was all about an esoteric character exploring esoteric worlds and I've always believed that was lost since then. No comedy, no dialogue, no one-liners, no goofy extra characters. More like the vibe of Ecco the Dolphin without the horrid gimmicks. Just pure mysticism. Total esoteric weirdness. No cuteness. No concept of multiple characters. Just a weird, mystical concept. I've never had the same appreciation for it since the second game came out and the American television series pretty much soured me on all of it. I'm still bitter about it. I hate all the additional characters but I can reluctantly give a pass to Miles and especially Amy. Sonic CD is way closer to my original interpretation than Sonic 2.
Is that unpopular? Unless we're getting way too deep into overly-specific model and render discourse, the modern Sonic design has stuck around because it works really really well.
Yeah, I think so, especially when comparing it to Classic Sonic's design. Someday, I'd like to know how the render for Sonic Unleashed came to be. How did they come up with that shape? I guess Shadow's game kicked off this style?
That never stopped, we’re just getting bored of the Unleashed model base because what looked great in 2008 is getting a bit stale in 2023. … fuck how is Unleashed 15 years old
Amy Rose's design has been awful for 25 years and I hate it. Pink and red are clashing colors and it looks ugly as shit. They're the colors I'd expect to see on a Muppet. How she can walk outside in public looking that silly is beyond me. How she's had this fit for 25 years, with seemingly NOBODY in the fanbase complaining, is even more beyond me. No amount of white trim is going to hide how hard these colors clash. Gurl, that is scandalous. When Kairi's design was revealed for Kingdom Hearts 2, everyone was pointing out how bad a pink dress looked when she had red hair. The backlash was significant enough that her KH3 design made her hair more brunette-ish and added more black to her dress, but no such backlash has ever existed for Amy, despite the fact that her entire body is pink, not just her hair, so it's much worse.
Idk i thought she looked cool with pink and red as a kid Granted shes basically Ecchan as a hedgehog but still
I once saw some art on DeviantArt that gave Amy teal clothes because, according to the artist who made it, red on pink = "seared retinas" (quotes because that's what I specifically recall seeing). Perhaps that might be more to your liking?
First I've ever heard of red and pink being clashing colors, especially since that's a pretty common color scheme in both fiction and real life. The kairi bit is a weird example because her kh2 design was where her hair changed from vibrant red to a brunette red, ig they went with vibrant red for her appearances in the HD-original KH games cuz that would explain that render. Spoiler: Kairi kh2
Where is it common for pink and red to be right next to each other on women's clothing, with absolutely nothing else besides a bit of white trim? Because this is the nicest I've ever seen it, and even then, the best things most people had to say about it was it was fitting for Christmas and Valentine's Day holiday parties. Because it's silly and it looks like a costume. Also, pink and red clashing is not a matter of opinion, it is a verifiable fact. Clashing does not just mean "it looks bad", it means they are literally right next to each other on the color wheel and are close to each other in hue. They do not harmonize.
Spicy hot take to follow: People who complain about Origins being the "bottom of the barrel" or "Sega doing the bare minimum" need to shut the fuck up and play something like Silent Hill HD Collection or GTA Trilogy before they bitch and moan about how bad they have it. We've been spoiled by dedicated fans who don't have to worry about corporate shenanigans that'll affect an official release. Unofficial versions like the decompilations and Sonic 3 AIR have given people unrealistic expectations that an official release won't be able to fulfill. I'm not saying Origins was released in a great state (it wasn't), but it was nowhere near the travesty it was made out to be.
This is the same website with mountains of documented evidence about the development woes under SEGA's thumb. And we still have people scratching their heads asking how Stealth and Tax didn't fix this one bug or didn't implement that one dream feature.
I mean overall I was still quite pleased with Origins, just frustrated at a number of aspects of Sonic 3's implementation, both aesthetic and mechanical. Had it been just 1, 2, and CD, the $40 price tag would have been steep but (aside from the quickly-patched bug with Tails in Sonic 2) the package wouldn't have been so obviously flawed. I'm presuming based on the prior comments from Stealth and his current involvement per the recent tweets that Sonic 3 is getting the bulk of the patching work. About the only thing I could ask for is script mods (as I do much prefer the RSDK script engine to S3 AIR's), but I don't expect to get that any time soon and it would be absurd to expect Sega to make a feature of this release.
Classic Sonic's current model is so pretty! While I really like Modern Sonic's current model (which might also be kind of unpopular I guess), Classic just looks so much better, I wish I could have him as an alternate skin in every new Sonic game. The only thing that really bothers me about him is how they treat him as "Kid Sonic", that's just dumb
This thread deserves to be better than a hot take thread. Herd mentality is a very real and very scary thing. Instead of shoving some poor individual to the fringe because they aren't saying the exact same thing everyone else is, only to later take whatever they're saying away from them and replace the previous societal narrative with it, society should instead maybe stop and consider what the person is actually trying to say. Genuinely crazy people are pretty easy to sift out if you're making a conscious effort to do so. Sonic 1, CD, and Chaotix, with their greater focus on exploration, represent the correct path. More attention should have been given to the ideas present in these games. I'm certain that the CD and Chaotix teams were treated like garbage because they each were the "B team" at the time. Sonic 2 was the incorrect path. The Sonic 2 Spin Dash is a terror that has doomed us all... 3 and Mania are attempts to salvage a bad situation. The Advance games, I'm not so sure, though Advance 2 boss design has a clear benefit in not allowing Spin Dashing. The whole "the first game never gets anything right" narrative really needs to stop. Likewise, the whole "sequels are almost always worse" narrative needs to stop. That society somehow doesn't collapse into dust when trying to reconcile these two things is astounding. I am deeply saddened to hear that the Genocide City thing is merely a "nitpick" at best. It's frustrating that anything that has to do with linguistics is treated as "semantics", a word that has been completely reduced to a pejorative, even when there's a ton of cultural importance behind the way a particular word is used (the actual meaning of the word "semantics"). Speaking of which, Double Spin Attack > that "Insta-Shield" gibberish. Just another example of why anything Sega of America ever put out needs to be treated with immense suspicion. Sonic 3 alone is not a "beta". You might as well call Sonic 1 or 2 betas at that point, and that's probably why people say they hate Sonic 1 so much. Please don't bring up the manual, yet another piece of SoA artistry. Should also be noted that Sonic 3 alone is CONSIDERABLY bigger than 1 or 2 (or CD even). The official narrative that Sonic was made "for the West" requires that you ignore how utterly Japanese these games are, and how American and European devs were never going to put out anything like this without outright being told to. It also requires that you ignore the screaming match between the Americans and the Japanese during the development of Sonic 2. We really oughta have gotten S4E3. Only Sonic fans are to blame for us never getting S4E3. On that note, Dimps is a good developer. We should never accept a S4E3 that is not by them. This hatred for bosses is incredibly suspicious and smacks of that same awful gotta-go-fast mentality that has plagued this series for decades. Bosses are fine. Everyone complained about the Advance 2 bosses, which was such a smart idea, so here we are. Likewise, Marble and Labyrinth and Sandopolis and such are perfectly fine designs. All this hate for Amy is getting out of control. Starting to remind me way too much of the hate for Yukari in Persona 3. The only problem with Amy's character is that she rarely thinks beyond Sonic. That's a pretty minor problem for a fictional character to have, but people seem to attach too much real life importance to it. On that note... something something stop hating on the S3 Sonic sprite start hating on the fact that nobody else got new sprites someting something. Being able to get all the Emeralds really early on is extremely silly. The Advance games linking them to specific zones was smart. The fixation on there being exactly seven Emeralds is potentially very limiting, but I understand that Sega really wants to stick with the Dragon Ball reference. Putting "Sonic was never good" aside, there really aren't very many genuinely bad Sonic games, and nearly all of the ones that are have sad developer stories. You shouldn't have to apologize for things like Labyrinth or Secret Rings. You should be terribly upset about what happened with 06. You should be downright furious over the scams that Big Red Button and Blind Squirrel tried to pull. Speaking of which, the 3DS Sonic Boom games are actually pretty good.
