The Werehog is especially egregious because it shows how badly Sonic Team missed the point of (any well-placed) criticism of the additional characters. Like you said, the compartmentalization of the characters into entirely separate games that happened to be stapled onto the core Sonic game was the problem. And their solution was to keep the compartmentalization of separate games stapled together, but have Sonic do them both. Honestly, I don't even think having separate games within the core Sonic game is the problem, it's how how mandatory they are. A rotating pachinko maze and an over-the-shoulder racing type game don't have much to do with a sidescrolling platformer, but that's okay because these optional pace-breaking side games are just that: optional, and on the side. They can be played if you want to play them, but they're not mandatory for progression. If Unleashed had Sonic turn into the Werehog during optional bonus stages that I only needed to complete to get the True Ending™, for instance, it would be a relative non-issue.
06 didn't full-on compartmentalize but did an even worse thing where it put all these characters in full levels but then explicitly limited when and where you could use them via sudden triggers by invisible barriers. Sega clearly took the reaction to this blatantly awful system that could be so much better with slight tweaking and was literally already officially done better before as a sign that Tails only belonged in cutscenes and Sonic can just turn into a wisp helicopter or something whenever convenient, just like everyone wanted
See, what's getting to me here is that I feel like I'm not being clear on what any of this stuff means and how it relates. 2D playable characters are always minor variants on Sonic, and the stages are designed to support the strengths and weaknesses of each of them. This isn't just more consistent, it's efficient design. The reason that the 3D games struggle with this is that they intentionally differentiate the characters and stages so much that they aren't compatible with one another. This is inefficient, and also constantly runs the risk of a given character being so different that they inevitably feel worse, or like you're not really playing a Sonic game any more. This hit Silver so hard Project 06 still can't make him fun, because his defining trait is having to stop to find a physics object to pick up and hurl at enemies, and no matter how powerful you make his psychokinesis, that slowness is always going to make him feel weaker and lamer than Sonic. This all isn't a coincidence, it's the natural result of making characters so distinct that you lose sight of the core underlying Sonic gameplay philosophy as an idea. Silver wasn't bad because of bugs, and while his stages do suck, there's not an easy way to just build better ones for him, because the idea of a slow-moving character that has to awkwardly pick up and fling physics objects at enemies in a game full of characters with more reliable physical combat is just a bad idea on the face of it. As @Zephyr said, this problem didn't stop when they got rid of alternate playable characters, because the Werehog was still a big slow distraction. If we're saying that the wisps are poor stand-ins for the other characters...why does it matter? Apparently those characters don't matter so long as the mechanics persist, right? So clearly there's something more than that. And there is! No matter how much you say "what's the point of them if they don't feel different to play", diversity in mechanics are not why fans want other characters to come back. They want them...because they like the characters! Because Sonic's got a big cast full of likable colorful heroes and people want to play as them. Because a character that you control is one that gets to have more context and more agency in the narrative, who can react to things differently, and they can't do that when they're stuck in the cutscene bin. Even if they were all just skins for Sonic (which apparently is just fine now if the game is good????), people would not be nearly as upset after fifteen years because the thing they like about the characters is the characters. If it were just about mechanics, people would hate that Shadow was playable in Forces at all...which didn't happen. Mostly people just hate Forces. In all this, Frontiers giving the characters minor differences in their movesets and actions would be taking the classic design philosophy and translating it into 3D, exactly the thing nearly everyone has been saying for years is the correct way to handle characters, because having those different abilities at all allows them to tackle the stages in a different way. It worked for every single 2D Sonic character except one, but the fun thing about Amy being shit in Advance 1 is that you don't ever have to play as her! Frontiers can one-up that game by just making her fun instead. The thing people have been pretty consistent about saying with Frontiers is that it's a good foundation for more interesting games to be built on-top of, and while I don't know for certain that the updates are going to be that game, what this does mean is that flipping the script so hard that we go back down the roads that lead us here in the first place is the wrong thing to be asking for.
You know what I hate? How this whole thing is just based on a 2023 update calendar with three uninformative pre-rendered images of the characters we'll apparently be able to someday play as, plus a couple mere words promising a "new story". I think the main thing setting off red flags about quality to me is that you think they'd at least have been able to show us an image or two of one of these characters in-game or just a moment of this new story by now. Them just promising still at what's almost the midpoint of the year tells me that there's still not much to show off and whatever we get will probably be rushed and unpolished. Like, it'd be dumb if Tails couldn't fly or Knuckles couldn't climb but I could see them going that direction if development is as middling as I suspect, which is basically my concern. And considering how the literal main game itself had mostly recycled levels I really don't have any hopes for this new story yet.
It's not the best but it's a nice, atmospheric breather after Metropolis as well as a nice break before WFZ which to this day still drains my lives far worse than Metropolis. Still dumb there's no way to make it go faster though and SA1 still has the superior slightly tedious Tornado segment.
In my mind, they're metallic, and something that'd help store up a charge. On top of this, I feel like it helps keep the color palette of them viewable from more angles. Even if it seems a little bit childish, I also think that works in the design's favor. It bothers me a little that the only part of the real Puma shoes used in the movies that keep it from not having the white + red + grey + yellow/gold color pallete is the tiny yellow tag on the front that *would* have the Puma logo, but then they dropped the branding (and were somehow allowed to keep the look of the shoes even though it's an actual design Puma owns) so then it's just that design with no real purpose to it other than "We didn't have time to design new shoes". Like I said, my idea is way too specific, but I actually think it'd fit in really well if Tails just made the light speed shoes off-screen or something for Sonic, even if they weren't any previously existing design. Idk I just want all the details my dumb brain interprets out of the DC light speed shoes to actually be real and used somewhere cool.
To be fair the roadmap was shown off in late November, just barely a few weeks after the game released, and with the second update having a confirmed date of Sonic's birthday (June 23rd) we likely won't be seeing the third story update until September-December this year. They probably had barely started work on that portion at that point so it'd be pretty damn hard to show an image or moment of anything, really.
Them limiting the development window to Sep-Dec would only affirm my fears and kinda what I was already expecting. I could see them making good characters with that time but with the new story as well, I really just don't know. I feel like at best one or the other will be not so good.
...They're not just sitting around twiddling their thumbs and only starting development in September. They started working on all three updates before they announced them, potentially before the game was even out. Kishimoto was talking about some of the work on update 3 before update 1 was out. The final update is the biggest, so it's taking the longest to develop, and releasing the latest.
I misread their post and was running with the idea that Sega was limited to that amount of time for whatever reason. Neat that they aren't but I hope we all know time isn't all modern Sonic Team needs. Forces certainly doesn't feel like it took like 4x as long to make than SA1.
Forces ditching the ability to drop rings was an idea that got way more negative reception than it needed to, (though I don't think they needed to drop ALL the rings) and was a perfect example of fans insisting on keeping to tradition just because it is tradition, even when it does not benefit the gameplay, or even harms it in some cases. Also, this might be because I don't really care about most of these games stories' and their portrayal/use of the characters, but I am 100% fine with just Sonic being playable. The others are pretty much never as fun as Sonic. Even in the Classics, only kind of Knuckles was fun. The only other example I can think of is Team Dark in Heroes, which is basically just Sonic's gameplay except with ocassionally, marginally better level design. Unless you count something like Sonic Riders. lol
I wouldn't say it's just tradition. The ring drop system is great because being able to lose health and pick it back up from the ground and keep going keeps the pace up. This, of course, is in constant flux with the difficulty of stages and bosses, since you can just keep picking up the same ring over and over to stay alive, which I assume is why you think limiting it has value. I think having the system atrophy or "decay" over time would make it more balanced, though it'd obviously need tweaking and experimentation to make it feel correct. Maybe rings bounce further away from you each time, or in a gradually more-unpredictable pattern, or maybe you just drop less each time, so you can hang onto one, but if you only have one, it'll disappear.
in Forces' case, the game was already designed around it. In "normal" gameplay, which caps rings at 100, not being able to pick up rings was their form of balancing things out - you couldn't just take the hit and instantly get back to 100 just from your failure (unless you were a Hedgehog avatar), but changing that one thing threw everything off for every character. This was made worse by "extreme" mode which for some reason uncaps your rings and still lets your drop them, making it really simple to just power through the supposedly harder of the two modes. It kind of makes me wonder if at one point rings functioned differently between every character, but then they just combined them all so nobody would have to remember which character did what and THEN modified it last minute after everyone made a fuss about it. Which is the real reason you can't always trust criticism from people who don't have the big picture in mind.
Even with the ring system in place, there are an infinite amount of ways they can still make taking damage have actual consequence, discouraging sloppy and careless play while encouraging the intrinsic satisfaction of playing with intention and that attention and skill being rewarded. They just don't have them in most cases. So yeah. If they aren't going to find ways to have consequences for taking damage, getting rid of one of the main reasons taking damage has little to no consequence in the first place is not a bad idea in my eyes. Keeping the pacing up? I think I get what you mean, so tell me if I'm correct: Rings can potentially make it to where you don't feel pressure to slow down so as to avoid taking so much damage you eventually game over and have to repeat tons of content. Is that correct? Well, I think that's not really necessary if they simply make sure these hazards are well telegraphed, even when moving at speed. And there are so many ways to do that, even in a 2D game. But I digress. Something you said makes me think of this. I don't really feel the need to make a whole issue about it, but just to make sure we are on the same page, I'll make this statement: You would agree there is a difference between difficulty and punishment, right? Difficulty referring to what you're being asked to do, and punishment being the consequences for failing to do that thing, right? Like, Celeste is a hard freaking game. But it isn't really that punishing because dying typically doesn't send you back that far, and restarting is pretty much instant allowing you to jump right back into the fun action. On the other hand, what if they asked you to run through freaking Emerald Coast without taking damage, perhaps due to their being no rings in the level. Well failure, would be more punishing. You'd get sent back farther. But not taking damage in Emerald Coast, the thing you're actually being asked to do, is not hard at all.
Sonic joking and saying "Baldy Mc Nosehair", in Sonic Colors isn't that bad. It's a fun game aimed for kids, not William Shakesphere.
Without a doubt, I agree with the sentiment that the characterization of certain characters was generally a lot "better" or at least a lot more likable in the "Adventure-Dark Age" games than in the "meta era" games. But the portrayal of the characters was the only particularly good things about those stories. And I'll tell you what the best climax in the series was, at least from a story standpoint. It wasn't anything in those games. It was the Death Egg boss and Doomsday Zone in Sonic 3K. Eggman got serious for real, and was super bent on holding on to that master emerald which he'd been trying to get for some time now, and you could tell in his actions as he pulled out one of his mechs after another.
I think groaning at Colors' lazy jokes is more of a response to the people in 2010 who acted like Colors was "actually funny" and "a return to form" or whatever. The adventure games are funny too and better yet not so proud of their jokes, and even betterer yet not so reliant on said jokes that it begins to muddle the stakes of the story. Yeah I think this is why Sega even still feels the need to add some kind of more powerful third-party villain to every new Sonic game despite how many classic fans don't want it. Eggman was just used too perfectly in 3&k and I think they know they can't top that. Even SA1 looks a bit insecure in this regard. Acting like the Egg Carrier's all impressive, already not even acknowledging the Death Egg's existence lol.
I know for a fact that this viewpoint is unpopular. Personal experience DX Silver is off-model in Archie and IDW. And it has caused a huge misinterpretation of the character's personality in fandom. The crux of my point is based on the objectively incorrect way his eyes are drawn by numerous artists. Silver has sharp-cornered "Tsurime" eyes when drawn on-model. Uekawa and Karasuno understand this. So even in joyous situations like at Soleanna's festival or when he's smiling and apparently in a good mood, his eye shape still doesn't fundamentally change into something it isn't; Compare to the way Evan Stanley for example draws him; Silver as portrayed directly above is portrayed as a fundamentally different character than he is in the games. Which is fuelling this image of Silver as some cutesy dork in fandom consciousness. And it isn't just Stanley that does this since Yardley does it too; This doesn't boil down to individual art style being an excuse as many have used to defend this. He's just being drawn wrong. Silver has what is called a "Tsurime" eye shape, a styling that is often used for characters who are more serious personality-wise. Shadow has them too. He does not have what is called the "Tareme" eye shape that you see on less serious characters and mostly on younger characters. This is what is causing quite a bit of the fandom to misinterpret Silver as, to quote, "A smol cinnamon roll" when his personality really isn't like that much. I find it obnoxious.
There are moments where they are okay. But in general, I don't really love, in many cases don't even like how IDW writes any of the canon characters outside Omega and Rouge. On my initial read through it, I didn't like any of the IDW original characters either. Though much later I tried to read IDW again, starting from the beginning, and I came to like them a bit more.
