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I feel like if Knuckles Chaotix ever became canon again, it'd probably occur in Classic Sonic's timeline.
Check out Rogues Gallery Transplant: The GameThat Classic timeline annoys me. If they want to make an Alternate Continuity that's fine, but it could be construed as them pulling a soft reboot by saying the classic games as we know them didn't happen in the modern era. They should at least give an explanation, like "when Sonic Generations happened it caused a Future Trunks situation". But that would still leave questions like "shouldn't there be Classic-exclusive characters like Mighty in modern games?"
I agree that era designations are kind of silly (not to mention they probably lead to more tribalism) but darn if they're not also fun to think about. It's kind of ridiculous how long we've been doing this, too. I remember the GHZ fansite describing 1995 as "The Dark Age" in, like, 1999. :V
Here's how it shakes out for me:
1991-2001 is The SegaSonic Era. The key feature here is that Sonic is the mascot character of one of gaming's main players, and his influence and popularity makes that company a household name. He is a Triple A franchise, and rivals other gaming icons. You could further break this down into three sub-eras: The Genesis era (which sets that standard), the Saturn era (the first dark age), and the Dreamcast era (an uneven return to form, but an ambitious return all the same).
A constant through this period is the influence of Hirokazu Yasuhara, the lead director/game planner of Sonic 1, 2, 3, & Knuckles. While the rest of Sonic Team was working on Ni GHTS and Burning Rangers, Yasuhara was working with STI on the ill-fated Sonic X-Treme. When that game got canned, he moved to the UK for a while to work with Traveler's Tales on Sonic R. He said:
1998-2009 is The Adventure Era. This crosses over into the previous era by a few years! I don't think era designations necessarily need a clean break. Sonic Adventure 1 is too much of a transition point between the two periods.
It also sees the loss of the original core trio of the Sonic Team... Yasuhara is gone before SA 1, Ohshima leaves before SA 2, and Naka quits before 06.
The main defining feature of this era is the end of Sega's console business, their establishment as a third-party developer, and Sonic Team's coinciding decision to take the series in a bold, different direction, with a much more dramatic, anime-inspired focus. To quote an interview with Shiro Maekawa (the lead writer of SA 2, who also did work on Heroes, 06, and the storybook games) from Sonic Team.com...
Honestly, I didn't like Sonic in the "Mega Drive Era". To be frank, it didn't suit my tastes. So when I was placed into doing Sonic Adventure I was excited! "I'm going to make a Sonic that I like!"
This was highly divisive at the time, but thanks to the sales of SA 2: Battle on the Game Cube, it was also highly influential. Maekawa's unique tastes brought a whole new flavor to Sonic, one that resonated with some people and alienated others. To some, it was their introduction to the series. To others, it was the abandonment of everything that defined their love of it. But it's the nature of a long-running series, it's always going to be re-interpreted like this over time, and this wasn't the first or last time it'd happen to Sonic.
The era fully comes into focus with the release of SA 2 in 2001, a game that, like most of the mainline titles of this period, would be made in the US by a sub-group within Sonic Team called "Sega Studios USA."
2007-2017 is The Boost Era. Sega Studios USA is no more. Sonic Team is fully integrated back in Japan. No trace of the original Sonic Team is left, and a younger group, many of whom grew up playing the games, starts to take the reigns.
This really gets its start with Sonic Rush in 2005, comes into clearer focus with a Sonic Team game via Secret Rings in 2007, and hits its stride with 2008's Sonic Unleashed, which combines and refines the most popular elements of both of them. And yet like Sonic Adventure, Unleashed itself is a transitional game. It started development as "Sonic Adventure 3," but had its name changed when the team felt they had evolved too far beyond that concept.
Just like SA 1 set a new foundation and SA 2 built on it, Colors calcifies what Unleashed started, and Generations further refines the formula. The early part of this era is, in terms of reception, the exact inverse of the previous one: Instead of the games getting progressively WORSE reception, they're getting progressively better, and by 2012 Sonic is cameoing in Disney movies, appearing in insurance commercials... the ship has been righted, people start calling it the "Renaissance Era," and there's a surprising air of optimism about the future of the series.
Then Lost World is a bust, the "Sonic Boom" project is one of the most expensive, ambitious things Sega's ever attempted with the series, but proves that the bigger they are the harder they fall, and Forces gets middling reception and fails to re-re-right the ship. The renaissance was short-lived.
But to someone who's been there since the Genesis, all of that pales in comparison to the brilliance of Sonic Mania, which I see as the vindication of our fandom. Sega's complete inability to follow-up on it in the five years since says something, I think.
Everything past that, we're too close to see clearly how it fits in. 2017 to 2022 has been a WHOLE lot like 1994 to 1999, a bit of a dark age. We've gotten spin-offs, compilations, movies, and comic books, and in a lot of ways the Sonic brand seems healthier now than it has been 'since' the mid-90s. I just hope Frontiers can knock it out of the park. In any case, Sonic continues to spin toward the future...
Edited by GeekCritique on Jul 26th 2022 at 10:57:07 AM
I honestly never understood the need to create different eras for the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. I mean sure, maybe it's done to help people distinguish between the types of games being released throughout the years. But, the way I see it, I just see the games as being their own thing and I judge the games based on their content, not based on the era they came out of. To me, breaking up the franchise into several different eras just causes even more frictions within the fanbase and we all know how divisive this fanbase can get.
I love animation, TV, movies, YOU NAME IT!I always figured that Vector really did know Sonic back in their band days, and that challenge stage in Generations is a jam session 'Just like old times'.
Edited by AceOfScarabs on Jul 27th 2022 at 9:46:37 PM
The three finest things in life are to splat your enemies, drive them from their turf, and hear their lamentations as their rank falls!The reason I believe this was done is because the games are not just their own thing. From Sonic Adventure onward the core gameplay and tone of the franchise changed immensely. Sonic went from being a 2D platformer to including a wider variety of gameplay types. Not only that but the cast and setting changed significantly.
Granted, as always, Mario did the same thing without causing as much confusion or divisiveness, but that's how SEGA chose to go about this.
It also let them market stuff like this which was pretty unheard of back when it came out. You wouldn't find Donkey Kong or Samus or Master Chief or Doom Guy teaming up with their past selves.
That's more the fanbase's problem than the developers I think.
Or at least it was until they opted not to create a sub-series of Classic games while continuing to make Modern titles. They could've easily remedied the divisiveness, had their cake and eaten it too because people like Sonic Mania and people want Sonic Adventure 3. People want improved remakes of Sonic 06. People like Sonic Colors and Lost World and even Forces to a degree.
Distinguishing the obvious difference between Sonic 1 to 3 (& Knuckles) and Sonic Adventure to Sonic 2006 isn't a problem. The sheer lack of pragmatism definitely was. A modern/classic split would be less of a problem if A) they didn't announce/people didn't adhere to there being "two separate worlds that never interact", and B) if they just made Sonic 4 like Sonic Mania and if Sonic Forces didn't suck.
Edited by FOFD on Jul 27th 2022 at 10:28:57 AM
Since nobody posted this yet.
Sonic Frontiers will be playable at EGX, a London gaming convention, in September
And yes, the render is official. 100%.
A lazy millennial who's good at what he does.Alright then.
Time for Sega to put up or shut up.
Go big or go home.
Win or die.
Etc, etc.
One Strip! One Strip!We've had interesting disasters from these guys.
Or rather, we've had disasters.
I think we'd all prefer something else.
I do hope Sega has truly been serious about making sure this is a good one.
Time will tell, time will tell.
One Strip! One Strip!It's still so weird to me that the open-world area that looks like a Windows backdrop and has random architecture floating in mid-air seemingly for the sole purpose of gameplay is the real world and the sub-levels that look like every other Sonic game is a fake digital world.
Almost weird enough to believe that's the big twist of the game, that it's actually the other way around, or at least that the open-world area is one layer of the digital world and the sub-levels are a different layer meant to imitate the real world.
Edited by PushoverMediaCritic on Jul 27th 2022 at 10:19:42 AM
Platforms and rails are floating in mid-air...
The actual architecture is all grounded.
Rules of the Internet 45. Rule 45 is a lie. Check out my art if you notice.Yes, that has been consistently pointed out many times...
The thing people don't seem to understand is that for as many times there are rails that naturally and diegetically fit into the environment...there are twice as many levels where that doesn't happen and rails just extend off of unrelated terrain.
And in the Boost games rail sequences tend to stretch on so long that it doesn't matter if they're connected to anything.
The other thing people don't seem to understand is that...regardless of the amount of levels where rails just stretch out to infinity over open space, outside of Final Rush & Rail Canyon you can't actually see those rails just floating over nothing before or after the dedicated sequences.
So when people say it looks ugly to just see random rails floating in the sky, it's because of where you see them along with the fact that you see them at all.
Rules of the Internet 45. Rule 45 is a lie. Check out my art if you notice.
