The short of my take on the plot so far is that Flynn is really into post-apocalyptic settings for Sonic (unsurprising, given that pre-reboot Archie was a post-apoc story), and wanted really hard to push a post-apoc story into Game! Sonic, and thus chafes a bit because Game! Sonic not usually being post-apoc means he had to dump the characters into this entirely new setting and pretend the characters react to stuff like this all the time. Amy just stands out as the funniest example of the dissonance that results.
It's the same suspicion I had about the Metal Virus arc, to be honest. The first big huge arc after Sega mandates the comic be more like the games is conspicuously a zombie apocalypse. Flynn has a comfort zone, and he would prefer to write in it.
With that in mind, I do wonder how he would've handled Forces. It also means my optimism for future games is a bit cautious, because I'm wary on whether morphing Game! Sonic into Comic! Sonic is a better concept than the one we just left behind.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Nov 11th 2022 at 9:46:57 AM
Well according to the man himself; the developers were the ones who made the setting, which characters would be present, and what their roles would be and Flynn had to pitch them a scenario based around that.
He pitched sixteen scenarios and Kishimoto picked the one he liked the most and that's what they went with.
A lazy millennial who's good at what he does.
I wonder if the devs decided Big would be in the game, or if it was just the main cast and he was given more freedom for side characters.
The Metal Virus was planned for Archie but was shelved due to not wanting to compete with Afterlife with Archie, and then when the license was transferred he used it at IDW.
(Speaking of pitched scenarios, apparently the Iron Dominion arc at Archie was a joke pitch to make the other options look better and when that option won he had to scramble to find a way to make it work.)
Edited by lalalei2001 on Nov 11th 2022 at 12:48:36 PM
The Protomen enhanced my life.The jokes from Colours to Lost World were constant and all the time, and all of the jokes were incredibly simplistic in nature, and that's why they just are consistently unfunny.
And because they're all over the game, it makes most of the plot incredibly uninteresting, especially in the case of Colours and Generations where basically nothing was going on.
Frontiers has its problems, but in general it's far less insistent on adding humour to the story, and the jokes that it does tell are at least mildly more complex.
Like the spinning sign gag is a meta 4th wall break joke, but it's started off by Sage asking about Sonic's end goal, and you can tell that Sonic (whether out of not realising or just being a little shit) took it literally to make that gag. Then they snapped back into the plot by quickly having Sage clarify what she meant. It uses the expectation of plot to set up the gag, and then once the punchline is delivered it transitions straight back into the plot.
According to
The Other Wiki it's the opposite—"Unlike prior Sonic media he had written, for which Flynn pitched stories himself, Sega dictated Frontiers's premise and which characters Flynn was allowed to use. Nonetheless, Flynn considered it "a dream come true" to write a major Sonic game, and he still got to present ideas for using more characters in the story to Sonic Team.
Kishimoto said this created a "cooperative back and forth" between Sonic Team and Flynn concerning which characters would appear. Given the nonlinear approach, Flynn found pacing the story was "the biggest question" and "had to be massaged and revised as the game's structure took shape." Kishimoto did the Japanese localization himself using Flynn's script as a base, making changes to suit the Japanese market."
Edited by lalalei2001 on Nov 11th 2022 at 12:51:19 PM
The Protomen enhanced my life.The Jokes in Lost World weren't "constant"...there were actual scenarios that surprisingly required different emotions.
Not every scene started with or capped off with a joke, some scenes didn't even have jokes in them.
Rules of the Internet 45. Rule 45 is a lie. Check out my art if you notice.![]()
I mean, I get that, but that just reads as "Sonic shouldn't be funny." I don't think the problem with Pontac and Graff was that they were jokesters. The humor was never the problem.
The characterization was the problem. The half-conceived attempts to write dramatic plots in Lost World and Forces with flat characters and meandered plotlines was the problem. The lack of consistency was the problem.
But the humor? Not inherently bad. There's a reason Sonic Boom (the show) is one of the better received Sonic productions in the last few decades.
It's why I tend not to apply my criticisms to Colors as I do the later games, since Colors was consistent. It was written entirely as if it were an episode of a Saturday morning cartoon. And it committed to that concept fairly well. Some of the jokes didn't land for me, but the jokes at least made sense enough that I understood they were written for a younger audience than myself. It's just YMMV whether you think Sonic should ever be written as a Saturday morning cartoon or not.
And there are times in Frontiers where it feels like the writing it trying to be humorless and falling flat, which isn't something I think is inherently better than trying to be funny and falling flat. It stems from the same problem of trying to push an emotion rather than writing it in organically.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Nov 11th 2022 at 10:04:26 AM
Post apocalyptic stuff isn't exactly new to Sonic—it was implied with the ruins in Hidden Palace Zone, Chaos's backstory in Adventure 1 was all about the Echidna tribe and the lost Chao, and a scrapped idea for SatAM had Robotnik and Snively be the last remaining humans who were off-world when...something-or-other happened.
Edited by lalalei2001 on Nov 11th 2022 at 12:54:44 PM
The Protomen enhanced my life.Quick question, was Sage being Eggman's creation supposed to be a surprise? Cause one of the first articles about it post-reveal
reveals who created her.
Just as most stories in this series, Lost World just needed a few more scenes that let the story naturally flow from one point to the next.
As the story ended up, it needed a rewrite of that scene where Tails gets captured in place of Sonic and Tails in general should've been less aggressive.
Yes.
Edited by randomness4 on Nov 11th 2022 at 1:01:19 PM
Rules of the Internet 45. Rule 45 is a lie. Check out my art if you notice.The plot is focused a lot on Sonic exploring that fallen world, connecting with the survivors (so to speak), watching and learning from the fallen's last moments, and trying to survive while trying to overcome the things at destroyed the civilization, etc.
It's got kind of that "aftermath of a zombie apocalypse" feel, where the world is clean and overgrown, and the only thing left in it are the monsters who destroyed civilization long ago.
The game's all in on it. Sonic and friends don't really bring much to the story themselves. They just kind of are there, being the ones experiencing all of it.
It's legit funnote how for the first few arcs Sonic doesn't even know what's going on and his only beat is maintaining that he's got jack to do with this madness and just wants to leave.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Nov 11th 2022 at 10:16:34 AM
I think I figured out why some content was recycled later in the game: they scrapped the first iteration of the game entirely
while working on the open-zone concept.
And more accurately when rolling.
Not by adding anything to the game, but simply adjusting an existing value already in the game
Pretty sure this is inaccurate. The one mod I've seen do anything like this, the creator said it actually took a decent amount of work and would probably break other mechanics such as boosting, and explicitly stated it was more a test than any sort of "fix."
There are more mods...
Control was adjusted as well.
Edited by randomness4 on Nov 11th 2022 at 2:38:57 PM
Rules of the Internet 45. Rule 45 is a lie. Check out my art if you notice.Doesn't the game already have modular control options? Definitely feels like massive misrepresentation, especially since the game has been out for less than a week; are these mods actually better or just going back to an older thing? I am highly suspect of any mod that claims it just "flipped a switch" and just works, it's very likely it doesn't actually work but people only use it in a specific environment to give the illusion of it working
The control settings in the game don't affect Sonic's momentum...
It just affects acceleration and turning.
Rules of the Internet 45. Rule 45 is a lie. Check out my art if you notice.

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Probably not since they're just mentions—they've only appeared in spinoff games so far, and we have no idea if their history is anything like their 'regular' incarnations.
The Protomen enhanced my life.