Sonic Frontiers Thread - PS4, PS5, Xbox, Switch, PC

Do you think everyone who grew up with a Sega console was born before 1981?

 

You can get upset at generalizations all you want, but there's a reason consensus' exist. I'm sorry I can't account for every single outlier out there.

 

I'm not saying you were generalizing, but that you were misrepresenting. Most "gen 1" Sonic fans were probably born in the 80s-early 90s and are therefore millennials. Their most formative memories were in the 4th and 5th gens, and that's where the majority of the millennial cohort is.

Most of the people who got into it as kids in the 6th gen were probably born in the mid-late 90s, and are a mix of gens Y and Z. Saying that period defined what Sonic was for the majority of "the millennial generation" probably isn't right, especially when the 16-bit games sold so much better than the early 3D stuff.

 

Evidently I'm speaking about the crowd from the mid to late 90's, otherwise I wouldn't have included Gen Z in the comparison and talked specifically about Gen X and early millennials. I figured that would be obvious given I mentioned the 6th generation specifically as opposed to the 4th and 5th.

 

I see, I read it as you saying it was all-encompassing. Consider this digression digressed then. This is Sonic Frontiers, not Sonic Generations!

 

Frontiers just out-shounend that entire era with it's super sonic battles alone, it's one of the reasons Frontiers was so well-received with fans in the first place, and more excited for the future of coming games

 

The Super Sonic parts did, of course. We literally got Super Sonic 2 out of it. I don't deny that.

But even then, I'd argue they were made more from the American Shounen fan's POV of the genre than a JPN one.

My point is that Sonic is no longer being designed primarily by japanese otaku who become game devs, which is essentially what a lot of the earliest devs were.

https://xcancel.com/judy_totoya?lang=en

This is the perfect example of exactly what the interests and inspiration of someone who actually worked on the classics were like. If you know the IPs he's into very well (many of which I'm also a fan of, or at least passingly familiar with), and know their history, you get a much better idea of the type of content and art that influenced these creatives at the time. This is often lost on a lot of people, I find.

 

Do we know about the interests of the Frontiers team?

 

Breath of the Wild

 

Not that you don't have a point, but they literally just introduced a Rei Ayanami copy and GIGANTO is cribbing pretty hard from Eva Unit 01.

I think the current team is that mix of Japanese Otaku and Western fans (with Ian Flynn at the helm).

 

I check the account, see Kaijus, reminded that Titans are basically kaijus, also reminded that despite somehow classifying Unleashed as "not shonen/not part of that era", that game literally end in what's basically a mecha fight against a kaiju, all interests that are rooted in Japan's otaku culture

Not to mentions Frontier's big inspiration from Eve yeah, not only the rei/ eva 01 unit connection, but even things like Supreme's 2nd phase

i DO get your points tho

 

Is it weird that the whole "East meets West" thing is something I actually really enjoy about Sonic?

Like, my ideal Sonic story would be for the main plot to be some crazy anime nonsense like SA2 with the over-the-top action of a Frontiers Titan Battle, but with just a tiny sprinkling of snarky western-style dialouge and Mickey Mouse-esque cartoon hijincks. (Think Mania Adventures)

(And when I say "sprinkling", I mean it. Just 1-2 shakes of pepper in the family-sized pot of Sonic Soup.)

I mean... isn't Sonic, at its core, "What if a Western-style cartoon character had super anime powers"?

Sonic is the illegitimate love child of Felix the Cat and Goku...

 

Anituber, Mother's Basement, once referred to Sonic as a "Vegeta-Mickey Mouse" hybrid and I have had that phrase burned into my memory ever since...

Shadow is a "Double Vegeta-Mickey Mouse" btw.

 

These distinctions and labels break down when you think about them for more than 2 seconds, anyway. A lot of very seminal manga and anime artists like Osamu Tezuka and Akira Toriyama were hugely inspired by western animation, especially Disney. Cartoons is cartoons, and the idea that Japanese cartoons specifically possess some sort of unique essence or style is a myopic oversimplification with some honestly very unnecessary "exoticism" thrown in. Artists consume art from other countries, which influences the art that they create, which is then consumed by artists in other countries. Around and around it goes in this connected world.

Not to mention that more specific descriptors like "shonen", which is a demographic that aims at "young boys", and not a genre with its own iconography or stylistic tropes, no matter how hard people try to pretend it is. Even if you wanted to say that there are some sort of stylistic trappings comprising a "genre" within anime and manga that is, I don't know, "Dragon Ball-likes" which we just call "shonen" because it's easy, then it's really hard to see how Neon Genesis Evangelion fits the description.

Don't get me wrong, I love classifying things and putting them into categories as much as anyone else, but people get way too hung up on which category certain Sonic games fit into and why. Especially today, with how different countries are more connected than ever before thanks to the internet, media exists in a very big melting pot, with more strands of cross-pollination going on than you could reasonably keep track of.

tl;dr "anime" and "shonen" are not useful adjectives outside of specifying a country of origin or a target demographic, and I'm tired of pretending they're not

 

"Shounen" indeed just means boys and describe the magazine's demographic which a work originated from, they can include romance works, slice of life works etc
, but When people say "Shounen" they largely mean "battle shounen" which is a genre, a valid one that largely classifies action works from Shounen Jump, works that have large focus on battles and powers and all that jazz

While in certain contexts those classifications turn silly "people arguing if a certain work is shounen or actually seinen etc" , in this context it's very clear the intention and what they means, so "shounen shit" is fine here, people knows what they mean, i don't believe Evangelion was classified as a "shonen inspiration" in this context...or any context, just was cited as an example of japanese anime influence

 

"Battle Shonen" is not an official term, just a fanmade term that is just generally colloquially accepted within that community, but breaks down once you move outside of it.

Yes, there are some stylistic and writing choices that tend to be embolic of the region they originated from, but its also not as all encompassing at some fans like to make it out to be.


So yes, when fans insist that shows like Sonic X are "more mature" than something like Sonic Prime, despite the fact that both shows target the same demographic, for no other reason than the fact that one is from Japan and the other has a few juvenile jokes (ignoring the fact that X has every single children's joke from Anime in that time period), it makes my eyes roll into the back of my skull.

I know tribalism will always be a thing in society, especially with a franchise as fractured and divided as Sonic, but I truly wish some of the people making these arguments read the things they typed....

 

What “official” means anyway, who decided what is official, it’s not like “metroidvenia” and “souls-like” are really official terms coined by some official organization or something, yet they are largely acceptable with the gaming community at large, either players or media, no fuss about it

 

You're missing the point; unless you're already deeply entrenched enough in the community to understand those terms, then they are meaningless. Even people in the souls community don't really care for the "X is the Dark Souls of the series" for any mildly difficult game, because its literally a meme from people who don't actually play those games.

Don't conflate what you consider "general knowledge" to be knowledge that everyone knows about.

 

I think I'm going to weigh in and push back on the "genre doesn't matter" stuff...

Genres exist to group multiple pieces of work together into categories where works share similar visual styles or themes. Lots of shows have similar visuals and themes, anime or not. These similarities are a product of the "Global Melting Pot" of media and inspiration.

Saying Dragon Ball and Evangelion can't both be described as "Shounen" is like saying Friends and The Office can't both be described as "Sitcoms". There are a lot of differences between Dragon Ball and Evangelion... there are also a lot of differences between Friends and The Office... but they still share some core tenants that make them "groupable".

I don't think it matters who "makes up" the genre terms. Just like any other word or categorization, it becomes legitimate when enough people start to find it useful. A lot of anime fans clearly find these genres useful, or the genres wouldn't exist.

So, I think saying terms like "Anime" or "Shounen" are "meaningless" is not true. You can say they're an oversimplification, but simplification is the purpose of genre in the first place. Also there are subgenres.

I also disagree that "people outside of a community not knowing the meaning of a word" means the word is "useless". Do you know what a "Macropus" is? What about a "Uracil"? One's the scientific name for the genus containing Kangaroos and Wallabies, and the other is a protein in DNA. Pretty useful words for scientists in their respective fields, even if you don't know the words yourself. If an Anime Fan finds the word "Isekai" useful and your average Big Bang Theory Enjoyer doesn't... that doesn't mean it has no use. It means the word has use for the people in that community.

Is describing a Sonic game as "Boost-Style" useless just because random people on the street don't know what that means?

What I will agree with is that I've always found "It's Japanese, therefore it's good/legit" and "It's not Japanese, therefore it's bad/fake" kinda gross. "Exoticism" I think describes it well. Of-course the Japanese culture influences Japanese art and gives it a unique feel, and you may enjoy their media output, but you should like it because it's good or has some particular themes, visuals, or messages that resonate with you... not because it's Japanese.

I've always seen Anime as a genre that originated in Japan, but not that something has to be Japanese to be of the Anime genre. Look at Last Airbender.

 

but Shounen/ Battle Shounen are widely used terms these days, it's not really some obscure term, you would hardly find anyone who watch any anime who isn't familiar with those terms and what they encompass, literally the most popular anime ever are all from this genre, that's why they are useful and valid.

Also Souls-like doesn't refer to mildly difficult games, it's the actual genre -or subgenre- of games that have similar elements to souls games like stamina, progression style, similar UI, "bonfires" and so on, the newly released "Lies of P" is souls-like, the upcoming Lords of the Fallen is a souls-like, and so on, souls community do in fact refers to those as souls-like, and implying that they don't is just false, in the end i mean the actual genre and not "WOAH CRASH 1 IS THE SOULS-LIKE OF CRASH BANDICOOT GAMES" kind of silly discourse

Also what @Lambda said.