FINALLY, someone mentions it. I was wondering what the hell was with the obsession with that word as of late. Anyways yeah there's definitely a interesting stink to early Archie that I also love. The "alone at a friday night" panel is just Sonic making some of the most abominable tree puns one could ever muster up and it's just amazing
Not Nintendo games in this discussion, but yeah. The term "charming" has become the go-to phrase for anything that's not bad enough that you can't force yourself to smile through it, but that's also not particularly good and you're probably letting your positive bias skew your opinions. Apply it to anything that's cutesy/family friendly/quaint to avoid having to provide constructive feedback.
On my first read through the Archie comic, I actually gave up around issue #15 because I was so fed up with the story not going anywhere. Mawhinney's art was nice and Gallagher's jokes were funny, but they were not enough to carry a comic stuck in the status quo. Hell, even Knuckles didn't become a recurring character until around the 30-issue mark, despite being introduced all the way back in #13. So once I got back at reading it, issue #17 was an absolutely incredible breath of fresh air. Not the main story, mind you, it was just your typical Classic Archie romp of bad puns, 4th wall breaks and pop culture references. But the backup story was something completely else. It was a Sally-centric story, a multi-parter spread across two issues and a special, it introduced numerous SatAM elements to the comic, did some genuine character development and world building, and was relatively somber and melancholic in its tone. Sure, it was nothing Eisner-worthy, and it was the first time Penders employed some of his frustrating writing tropes (namely his whole "retroactively making a newly introduced character into someone really close to a main character" -thing), but it was exactly what the comic needed to hook me back in, and I'd genuinely call it the best story Ken Penders has ever written. And while we're on this topic in this very thread, let me say something that appears very contradictory to my avatar: The Endgame saga is a bloated, incoherent mess of a story which people only pretend to like because of how "epic" it is. In fact, had the comic never become like... that... during issues #90-#159, I'd call it the worst (main series) Archie Sonic story ever written.
I think that's silly. People liked Endgame because it had action and stakes. Mostly only in the first and last issues, granted, but it navigated being a mess better than plenty of other issues, since, y'know, the entire comic was kind of a mess. Besides, if you're putting the jump-the-shark moment anywhere near #90, that still leaves every horrible boring Knuckles story in the way. The incredibly botched SA1 adaptation (which if we're being fair can't be credited for any of the good storytelling from the game), every ugly Frank Strom snorefest, and fourteen out of fifteen horrible Super Specials. I'm not sure what exactly is supposed to make the "a bit too long and messy" action story worse-written than the veritable factory of boring, logically-broken, often kinda offensive slop that Penders was running in the Knuckles comics and his backup stories.
That's why I was talking only about the main series. The Super Specials were pretty stupid for the most part, while I've deliberately avoided reading Knuckles like the plague. But in my honest opinion, the main series was relatively decent at the time. Sure, there were some stinkers, like the first instances of Penders' "Sally's purpose is to get married and be grateful for her dad because of it" -bullshit, meaningless filler like the Noir Zone story and Horizont-Al and Verti-Cal's return and that Mammoth Mogul story which gave you zero context had you not read the tie-in Knuckles issue. But on the other hand, the good chunk of this era was spent on the Ixis Naugus saga, which was everything that fans had been asking from the comic since its beginning; fun and thrilling adventures starring Sonic and Tails. Combine that with decent-ish world building and sleek, stylized artwork from Steven Butler, and you're left with arguably one of the better long storylines of the comic's early years. And while I totally agree that the Sonic Adventure storyline isn't really good, the downright insane behind-the-scenes story of how it came to be (and some really sharp artwork from James Fry) has given me a lot of appreciation for it. Also, the buildup to Robotnik's return was pretty good, if a bit predictable, while "Heart of the Hedgehog" from issues #86 and #87 is a genuinely brilliant Metal Sonic story that I'd recommend every fan of the OVA to read. Hold on, is liking this era an unpopular opinion too? Then I guess I really am on the right thread.
I somehow completely blinded the words "main series", but I still think that's a pretty weird way of viewing things. Even the hunt for Naugus I don't love, it ends in a giant anticlimax founded on the extremely inconsistent mechanics of rings in the Archie universe. I feel like if you're going to add a modifier like "only the main series" when it's so tied-into the Knuckles stuff, going with "what they went through to make this is real interesting" would end up making a lot of crappy stories seem underrated. Also I have no idea which eras are popular, other than the Ron Lim concentration being inversely-proportional to the reception of the series.
I'm just imagining a world where we would've had many arguments about "Was Locke actually a bad father?" if Penders' sensibilities as an artist were a bit more palatable to a 90s audience.
I agree, consider that Shadow is cool af no matter what they do with him, and Silver has been lame no matter what they ever did with him. to the point where this is one of things a lot of people know about the game Silver debuted in. that aside, I think the biggest obstacle to him doing Good in the movies is that...everything I've seen him in, he's kind of a dork? which is fine, except that in the movies Sonic himself is already a bit of a dork...
I felt like Silver's rival battle in Generations was basically the only good thing they've done with the character, and considering that the fight ends with him crushed under his own ball of psychic debris, that's not really a good look for Silver... I guess he'd be a good candidate for a comic relief character who's usually the butt of the joke. But I'm sure his few fans wouldn't be happy about that. More on the topic though, I definitely am of the unpopular opinion that Chao Gardens aren't worth bringing back, especially if they are tied to completion of the game.
Most of the Classic Era spinoffs are not that bad, I enjoy most of them, including Sonic R, 3D blast, and Spinball
Is Labyrinth a puzzle game? I'd sooner call it a "walk around 'em up". You don't really solve puzzles. You just walk until you find the way out.
One personal taste thing for me is that I really don't like the "Gerald and Maria are Shadow's loving family" angle they've taken lately and I like the Black Arms even less. Shadow's story was a lot more interesting and poignant when he genuinely was a victim of the humans who decided in spite of that to be a hero. I'll admit up front that I may be misguided because I really disliked Shadow Generations' story and so I didn't read the Gerald diaries, so please correct me if I'm wrong here, but it seems that in order to let Sonic and co. be superheroes that the world calls on in times of crisis (especially in the movies, ugh don't even get me started) they had to shift all the blame for the Ark massacre to the Black Arms and other bad guys pulling strings behind the scenes. GUN's actually not all bad, guys! Shadow works with them sometimes and they were tricked that day! The official manga apparently even has Black Doom possessing the soldier who killed Maria?? Morality in the Sonic world seemed a lot more gray in the Adventure era, where our main characters would always just do their own thing even if that made them enemies of the state, and the villains of those games were more or less the military industrial complex itself - not ontologically evil aliens who want to destroy the Earth because they're just evil and that's just what they do. There was a theme of rising up against authority if it's the right thing to do, and that theme seems to not only have been brushed aside but actively retconned in order to justify those authorities working together with the heroes. After everything they did in SA2, I find it shocking that GUN was sanitized and made into allies of the heroes off screen between games.
I don't get the sense from SA2 that Gerald was ever a very good person, or that he really cared about Shadow at all. A good person doesn't just snap into being a genocidal maniac and the fact that he modified Shadow's own memories to manipulate him into becoming an accessory to his plan was further evidence of this. We are introduced to GUN minutes into Sonic Adventure 2 and the immediate first impression we get is that they're careless and quick to use excessive force for short-sighted gains - Gerald's working directly with this organization to create weapons of mass destruction capable of destroying the entire planet, and we're supposed to think he's actually a swell guy who broke bad? Taking Sonic Adventure 2's story alone into account Gerald and GUN were both rotten to their cores and it was their contest of egos that almost doomed the world before Shadow finally woke up and chose not to be their pawn. In fact I love that both parties saw Shadow as a weapon and his act of defiance was inspired by the only person who saw him as a friend. This entire dynamic has been shafted in favor of Bad Guy Aliens pulling the strings. Maria herself didn't have much of a character at all in SA2 and served as more of a plot device. Now that they've decided to use her more, she's... still not much of an actual person? She's sweetness and goodness personified and I'm not seeing how that actually makes the story better. We find out she even gave Shadow his name, because "a shadow shows you where the light is" or some shit? Spoiler At the end of Shadow Generations she's immediately willing to fall on the sword because Shadow needs to move on and let them go... she's twelve years old and she's talking like this? Is this a little girl or the Virgin Mary? I can understand his one and only friend being very dear to him - we've gone from that to her practically being his mother. The point I was trying to get at is that in trying to expand on his backstory I feel they've taken away everything that made it cool in the first place, only to replace it with something that's a lot less interesting.
