Retsupurae

As a person who grew up on Pokemon (and has never forgotten that fact, unlike a lot of the 4Kids haters) I know NY has some great VA's who you tragically don't hear enough. I mean, I love Kirk Thornton and Roger Craig Smith as much as the next guy but you can hear them in every other anime dub ever. Kirk especially. I think between him and Michael Mc Connohie they have voiced every anime in the last two decades, sometimes playing two or three roles in the same show. (which isn't good because their very awesome and distinct voices do not lend themselves to variety)

jason Griffith isn't my favorite VA or anything but he's not bad and then there's DAN GREEN and Lisa Ortiz. Then again, she's got her own hates....

I guess what I'm saying is, I don't blame the VA's for some of the shoddy performances. (and not all of them were actually shoddy) I also miss them because it's just nice to hear something new since I watch anime so much.

Anyway, getting back to Sonic 06, one of my favorite things last time I watched an LP of this game was how your companions just die behind you. This LP reminded me of it and how hilarious it is. You're just strolling through town doing sidequests and you'll hear NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO which signals they got themselves killed. And you just keep running. It never stops amusing me.

So to people who have actually played this game, how do you rate the three characters' playstyles and levels? Do you agree with slowbeef's ranking of Sonic is just kinda bad, Silver is AWFUL and Shadow is lazy? I'm on Episode 16 and his general verdict seems to be that Silver's is the worst but he seems to prefer it to Shadow.

edited 15th May '15 10:09:56 PM by Nikkolas

The thing about taking the story seriously, it's like this: To take a story seriously, it needs to make sense. And it needs to be in a setting that makes sense. As a different example, think about whether it would make sense if you took characters like, say, those from Halo and put them into a setting like the Mushroom Kingdom, but with a tone that expects you to take everything totally seriously. It would likely seem patently ridiculous, especially if the writing was subpar and the plotting was contrived and convoluted to begin with.

My point is that while people may mock the whole "trying to take a silly animal series seriously" thing, that's the least of the issues at play in this game. It is highly possible to take a series with a silly premise and give it a story that you can take seriously...if the writing is good. Look at all the Mario RPGs. While they do generally have a mostly jokey tone to all the dialogue, the plots can get into some rather heavy stuff—lost love and depression, mass kidnapping and murder, the intricacies of what it's really like in the science department of a prestigious university (apparently, biological warfare)... You can take the base plot seriously because the gameplay (with fun mechanics, actual beta testing, etc.) and the dialogue (witty, sensible, not making its characters out to be idiots unless it's for intentional humor) consistently keep you entertained. It doesn't take on something overwrought, twist it up like a badly-stretched pretzel, throw in tons of mechanics that should work at their base but just don't, etc.

TL;DR: People don't think Sonic games shouldn't be taken seriously because it's Sonic, but because Sonic Team just always fucks it up so badly when they do that it's not even worth it at this point.

Wow that was way more than I was planning to say on this subject.

that pretty much sums up my feelings on the issue perfectly.

Weren't the original Genesis games about Sonic saving his animal friends from the evil genius who was imprisoning them in robot suits?

yeah, actually that was entirely what they were about. the whole plot heavy stuff only took off in adventure and was a characteristic of the series up until around sonic unleashed and colors where they finally decided to take it easy.

Eggman/Robotnik I'd call a good voice actor

I mean he was the only 4kids actor they didnt replace

Though to be fair, his voice for the character seems to be trending more and more toward his natural speaking voice as the years go on (at least, when he's not yelling).

Still, Mike Pollock is a consummate professional. Listen to him in interviews and he's got the most professional view of the voice acting biz (which, to be fair, is exactly how most voice actors probably see it). He doesn't mince words about it and tells it straight up that it's still a job like any other and keeps a demeanor that lets you see that, even in spite of the fannish nature of the questions people often ask him.

edited 16th May '15 2:22:14 AM by Odd1

@8101: Roger Craig Smith doesn't do a lot of anime and never did. Hell, he had a total of like 6 major roles and a dozen bit parts working at Bang Zoom before he got cast as Ezio and moved on to video games and western animation. Thornton is indeed much more prolific, though.

@8105: Hey, you forgot Sonic Sat Am and Sonic CD! They were indeed more serious than the Genesis games. Well, the latter mostly because of the Bad Futures being hardcore dystopias and the really creepy as fuck soundtrack.

Only the US had a creepy as hell OST last I checked.

[bait] Ok, so let me rephrase that: the good soundtrack was creepy as hell. [/bait]

Hurf.

Derp.

I first heard Smith as Shinji in Bleach. Then I heard him as Deidara in Naruto.

Looking it up, he's got nothing on Kirk, that much is true. He's probably got nothing on a lot of the NY voices really. It's just you don't hear them as much anymore and that makes me sad. It reminds me of Ocean in a way since you don't hear them enough anymore either. It's why David Kaye had to move to LA - it's the only place to get good work.

Whatever, I'm just gonna go read Archie Sonic. I get all the story I need there.

Still need to catch up with this LP though. On Episode 22 now.

edited 16th May '15 1:25:55 PM by Nikkolas

Well, given licensing is going right now, I think a lot of anime V As will have to move to Texas, given how Geneon and Bandai folded and Aniplex/NIS rarely dub anime and Funimation and Sentai licensing pretty much everything.

Is that why so many V As are from Texas? That sucks.

Well Funimation's headquarters or whatever are in Texas so that's a thing that might be part of it. I live in Fort Worth now and my GF's cousin used to work there.

Anyway, on Episode 26. Slowbeef said he was interested in LP'ing Shadow's game which just makes me more convinced that I need to play it too. The more recent comic storyliens kinda serve as a sequel to the game so I need to play it to understand about Black Arms or whatever.

I know I could just wiki it or watch the videos on YT but the comments in the RP Sonic 06 videos say Shadow's game is completely functional and playable, just a bit mediocre.

I don't know about that.

Some levels of Shadow are fine, but others are... really just standard 3D Sonic fair, honestly, but they feel so much worse. You'll end up dying a lot just because you misaimed a homing attack.

edited 16th May '15 10:05:03 PM by Mukora

The comics are an entirely separate canon. While recent events have made them closer than ever before^e.g. (Ken Penders's lawsuit forcing Archie to scrub every character he ever created from existence, and redesigning the supporting/SatAM cast & nixing the planet name "Mobius" for the games' more ambiguous "Sonic's world" along the way), reading them for insight on the games is not exactly something I'd advise; you'll probably get it, but you'll get a lot of extraneous information that only pertains to the comics as well.

EDIT: Oh, wait, I read that backwards. You want to play the games for context on the comics, not the other way around.

...Anyway, if they react this well to "His World", I'm eagerly awaiting them running into Sonic's credit theme.

edited 16th May '15 10:51:27 PM by ShadowHog

Or Shadow's.

Well I'm caught up. I wonder who they'll do next. Given that Slowbeef's "favorite" is Sonic, maybe they'll go with Shadow next just to get him out of the way.

ALL HAIL SHADOW.

Nobody needs to play that game.

There are worse games out there.

Hell, there was a whole argument in the YT comments section of one of the 06 videos where it was generally agreed Sonic 06 isn't even the worst game ever and by all accounts Shadow is a bajillion times more playable than that.

Unless a game is seriously broken (as in, unplayable or almost unplayable because of glitches and bugs and bad controls) I see no reason not to play it.

Except Metal Gear Solid 4 but that's a special case. i play MGS for the story and 4 absolutely ruined the story so I'm never going to waste my money.

And yes, no matte what happens in Shadow's game, I will not hate its story more than MGS 4's, because there's a little thing called expectations. Being an MGS fan for many years and eagerly awaiting how Kojima would follow up MGS 2 did MGS 4 no favors. I have no such high hopes for Shadow's game. I'm going into it with benign interest

There are people who like Shadow's game, ironically and un-ironically. That's more than I can say for Sonic 06.

edited 18th May '15 5:35:14 AM by Nikkolas

I have nothing to add to this.

needs more Ridleysaurs

I think I may have played the possible sequel to this game, Frightfearland. The 2 protagonists in that game look like the ones in Haunted Mansion.

edited 18th May '15 12:14:42 PM by ScottPilgrim2013

Nope. Carn Evil came out in 1998. This thing came out in 2009.