General Sonic The Hedgehog thread

I greatly enjoy Colors, but I understand why it could be a turn off given how many certain elements of Sonic some fans enjoy that it largely (somewhat unintentionally) rejected. I'd say it was a positive release for the time period given it was a bit of good press when the series desperately needed it, but I also think Generations greatly improved on it and that level aesthetics and (certain) utilization of Wisp powers aside, its not something that future games necessarily need to crib from.

Its a solid Sonic 1 esque throwback with its level design featuring a light hearted story and that's all it really needed to be in the grand scheme of things.

Edited by BorneAgain on Mar 16th 2023 at 5:14:30 AM

Still waiting for a Legion of Losers movie...

Colors is...fine. Not really good, not really bad. Just pretty inoffensive tbh.

Its basically the Sonic game for people who didn't like any of the games from the previous decade or had never played a Sonic game before in their life.

Edited by BlackYakuzu94 on Mar 16th 2023 at 5:20:23 AM

A lazy millennial who's good at what he does.

The dialogue in Colors fails so hard at being funny that it actively annoys me into being unable to fully enjoy the gameplay, which itself is already just "okay".

None of the people I mentioned play Sonic games for their dialogue or story anyway.

A lazy millennial who's good at what he does.

I enjoy the aesthetic of the levels.

To win, you need to adapt, and to adapt, you need to be able to laugh away all the restraints. Everything holding you back.

X3….. That’s just stupid. If you think the story isn’t that funny that’s one thing but to knock down a completely unrelated aspect of the game because of it is unnecessary.

Colors, for better or for worse, is very much defined by what it is not. Not a story taking itself seriously, not an overall experience featuring multiple gameplay styles, and not a title attempting to be grandly ambitious in its scope. For casuals, outsiders, and some old school fans, those were features, not bugs.

Edited by BorneAgain on Mar 16th 2023 at 5:28:33 AM

Still waiting for a Legion of Losers movie...

I don't really care for ambition if it had interesting level design...

It's just not a replayable game for its scope.

YO. Rules of the Internet 45. Rule 45 is a lie.

You need to understand that most Sonic fans who grew up in 2000's are big fans of the characters and lore surrounding them, so if the dialogue sucks its going to bother them more than anything else related to the game.

This is why I called it the game for people who didn't like Sonic games at the time.

Edited by BlackYakuzu94 on Mar 16th 2023 at 5:34:05 AM

A lazy millennial who's good at what he does.

And in fairness to the fandom, that's hardly exclusive to Sonic. Dm C: Devil May Cry doesn't actually have all that bad gameplay, but the title's very story (paired with an... inconsistent tone) struck people as a rejection and antithesis of the setting/characters in mainline Devil May Cry they loved. The underwhelming sales numbers and seeming abandonment of that sub-series reflects just how much fans not connecting with characters can matter a lot.

Edited by BorneAgain on Mar 16th 2023 at 5:42:17 AM

Still waiting for a Legion of Losers movie...

The main difference is that Devil May Cry games were actually considered good before Dm C, so the retool was completely unnecessary in the eyes of the fandom.

Sonic games had long since had a reputation for being of lesser quality. So of course the first game that has nothing really wrong with it would be highly praised.

Edited by BlackYakuzu94 on Mar 16th 2023 at 5:49:18 AM

A lazy millennial who's good at what he does.

I know we probably moved on from Sonic Heroes talk, but I just found out what the initial line-up for playable characters were in those games

https://www.reddit.com/r/SonicTheHedgehog/comments/8fd5hn/the_initially_planned_teams_for_sonic_heroes_are/

• Sonic, Tails, Knuckles
• Amy, Cream, Rouge
• Chaos, E102, Big
• Espio, Charmy, Vector
• Fang, Bean, Bark
• Metal Sonic, Ray, Mighty

Damn that's quite the change, but I mostly bring this up because the discussion centered around how to retrofit characters into the speed/power/flight dynamic and whether or not certain character could make sense when it came making a team for Blaze and Silver. It's also old so I'm sure some of you know this by now, but still it's really interesting to see and think about.

Yea Shadow wasn't brought back yet, and thus there was no need for Omega as a third member for Team Dark.

And they probably forgot Gamma was supposed to be dead.

Edited by BlackYakuzu94 on Mar 16th 2023 at 5:50:58 AM

A lazy millennial who's good at what he does.

I'm amused at the idea of two seemingly dead/passed on characters working with Big; presumably he just fished them out of somewhere and now they're just a team.

Same with Metal Sonic teaming with Ray/Mighty; either they believe the robot's changed its ways or the latter have even worse vision than Amy and think that's actually Sonic.

Edited by BorneAgain on Mar 16th 2023 at 5:54:53 AM

Still waiting for a Legion of Losers movie...

It should be kept in mind that a lot of that seems to be just a "throwing ideas around" stage of planning. Like someone asked Maekawa how Metal Sonic/Ray/Mighty would have worked and if they were to be villains, and Maekawa just responded by saying they hadn't thought through anything that far ahead yet.

That might be why we got Chaos Gamma, who is noted as having parts of Omega and Gamma too(pretty much the reason why Battle takes place after Shadow's own game, since he has his memories back, and we know Heroes is pretty clearly before Battle).

Anyway, yeah, having really bad dialogue in Colors is going to turn people off. That makes sense. Lore and characterization is important. There's a reason why some got annoyed at Amy being a yandere/crazy in general, or that Shadow in the Boom iterations is just an asshole for the sake of it(he doesn't even have an excuse, like Mephiles has at least a semi-clear plan. Sure, it's still vague, but we know what he wants. Why? Doesn't matter. But you see some semblance of a reason he does this. Shadow just... is a jerk for the sake of it in that continuity. Only the TV show semi-gives him a reason for revenge. ...Cause he tricked. Fair enough).

...It's weird having so many websites and no way to properly display now, lol.

I remember seeing something that said they didnt bring back Gamma once they decided to bring back Shadow because they didnt want to bring back more than one dead character.

Edited by Zeromaeus on Mar 16th 2023 at 8:10:58 AM

Mega Man fanatic extraordinaire

I remember Devil May Cry was rebooted because there was a strong anti-Japanese sentiment at the time, for whatever reason. Presumably that affected the rodent's series.

To win, you need to adapt, and to adapt, you need to be able to laugh away all the restraints. Everything holding you back.

DMC was specifically a Capcom thing. Keiji Inafune was pushing the company really hard to be more "Western" because Western games were starting to do really well and sell huge numbers, while Japanese companies including Capcom were struggling more to acclimate to making HD games and their games generally weren't selling as well with the new Western audiences that the popular Western games were bringing into gaming. Capcom tried outsourced a lot of their series to random Western dev studios and it all generally ended in disaster for them.

Maybe that general climate affected Sonic as well, but I think that's more unique. Sega didn't really change anything about any of their other series, but around 2009-2010 there seemed to have been a big shake-up with Sonic Team and the brand management of Sonic within Sega as the prolonged result of Sonic 06's poor reception (and somewhat unfairly poor reception all Sonic games started getting in the years afterwords), which included Sega of America getting more influence over things again.

And Sonic has always been way more popular in the Western hemisphere to begin with, so Sega of Japan probably figured with the restructuring and everything going on, they wanted to cater more towards the casual audience and reestablish Sonic's presence in the West.

Sonic Boom was specifically created to have a brand of Sonic that was rooted in the West....except Sega of Japan still decided to meddle despite that.

A lazy millennial who's good at what he does.

'cause heaven forbid someone have a different opinion than you or find something fun that you didn't, that must be it.

Or, to use your exact wording from another thread where the shoe was on the other foot, "Well that felt a little rude"

Edited by wanderlustwarrior on Mar 16th 2023 at 9:58:48 AM

The sad, REAL American dichotomy

You can feel however you want about it, but that was the general sentiment at the time and Borne Again even validated it. Sonic Colors brought back many people who either had stopped following the series after the late 90's or early 2000's or were introduced to the series for the first time since it was on a console as widespread as the Wii.

I don't know how else to word it; it was a game intended to be for a more casual crowd compared to the games prior.

A lazy millennial who's good at what he does.

The specific part of the quote you've chosen seems like it was targeted at the game's difficulty...

Appp...Accessibility.

YO. Rules of the Internet 45. Rule 45 is a lie.

I wonder what a more "hardcore" Sonic game would comprise of. Most, if not all the franchise titles are fit for the gaming crowd. It's not like you're needing to grind out achievements, side quests or in-game items to unlock new levels or cutscenes. The investment comes from completing the story mode itself.

EDIT: Yes, I'm aware Frontiers can be considered that hardcore title, but I don't feel it's hardcore enough from my perspective. Sonic Team could've gone a little harder on customization and could've provided a much fuller experience if given the time they needed in the first place.

Edited by Tony-Sharx on Mar 16th 2023 at 8:22:41 AM

People are in fact bad at Sonic games to be fair :V

But yes, Sonic Colors was a more accessible game than what had came out before, both on a plot and gameplay front. In the case of the latter it was especially easier compared to its immediate predecessor which is infamous for being arguably the hardest 3D Sonic game to date.....god I miss Unleashed.

That was a real fucking challenging game...

The difficulty came from the level design and actually navigating it.

Edited by BlackYakuzu94 on Mar 16th 2023 at 11:19:40 AM

A lazy millennial who's good at what he does.