Sonic the Hedgehog's Future
 

So, recently we have had a bunch of crappy Sonic games. :tgrumble: I wonder what his future will be like. I think it's dead. It seems like Sega is beating the dead horse into the ground, which sucks because Sonic could be good again. All you really have to do is go back to the original formula: Going fast in 2-D. It could be like the New Super Mario Bros. series. Same overall gameplay with a few new elements and updated graphics. :teek: And forget Sonic Boom ever existed. That sucked. Or they could make an actually good 3-D Sonic game. That's not impossible, but Sega seems to think it is, seeing how bad the games are.

The Sonic Boom series is terrible but the last real Sonic game was pretty good. It's a shame people were really mixed on Lost World because that's a direction I'd love to see them stick with in the future.

They already did Sonic 4. It was "old school" and great and nobody cared.

Honestly, they could make the greatest Sonic Game Ever like tomorrow and it won't change anything. The franchise's reputation has been irreparably damaged , to the point where even the good games are dismissed out of hand. Forevermore, it's just going to be a franchise for kids full of games of poor-to-average quality, with an occasional game that's actually Good, like Generations, that nobody will care about because "It's Sonic, Thus Crap".

Anyone wants to "save" the franchise, they'd better build a time machine. It is what it is, now.

"recently" we've had crappy Sonic games. Aren't pretty much all games starting with Sonic Adventure considered crap by the general consensus? So since 1999 they've been crappy. You can even go back as far and say Sonic 1-3 are the only good Sonic games since Sega whoring out sonic is nothing new, just look at all the Sonic games released in the 90s. In fact it was recently that Sonic was getting "better" with "colors/generations" bringing good word of mouth. With Sega focusing on mobile games now Sonic's future doesn't look bright but you never know, I read an interview last week that Sega was learning a lot from Atlus and how a quality game can sell itself and that maybe they haven't taken as much care of their properties as they should've, who knows if any of that actually comes to fruition.

With Sega's state as a company these days, who knows? Personally, I really enjoyed Sonic Lost World on Wii U in spite of its steep learning curve.

But if you are curious about Sonic's future, it has been explored once or twice...

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If Sonic's arms continue to be blue, there will be no future for him!!!!1!

They need to get rid of the green eyes and bring back his pot belly!!! :lol:

Actually that Sonic's future is no longer canon ;)

I actually don't understand the hate for Sonic getting blue arms, it's not that radical of a change.

I agree. I like the tan arms more tho.

Heh, kids have been coloring them wrongly for years! I suppose it was only fitting that it got made alternative canon!

BTW, yeah, I've read the current Archie comic post-Genesis/Worlds Collide, so I know the continuity has gotten a major reset. But I think the Mobius 25 Years Later project was always intended to be "one possible future among many." Honestly, I hate that whole storyline. It just felt like Ken Penders's own personal playground to develop his anthropomorphic echidna fan-fiction universe.

It's a running gag because Chris-chan tried to start a boycott over it. Anyone jumping onto that bandwagon now doesn't realize they're being played for a fool.

Anyways, here's something to think about - Sonic was never very good. Just mull that over a bit.

I was making a joke based on that. I didn't think it would go over anyone's head...

just ask Ken Penders about Sonic's future, he will more than welcome the time of day

Oh, I thought it was a legitimate concern, I guess for some people it really is since I never caught any sarcasm or trolling in posts. I don't keep up with Chris-Chan, last time I read about him was when he broke his Sonichu bracelet or the time he went on a date only to be cockblocked by a guy in an outfit and those were years ago I think.

Which from what I read online it was exactly that. Never read any Sonic Archie comics but I still thought it was oddly amusing to follow that story, can't believe Archie's lawyers lost. wow.

I don't know if anyone agrees, but I personally believe Sega should give the poor guy a break.

I get Sonic is a popular franchise, but considering the damages over the years, Sonic should be left away for a bit, at least game wise.

Last month, I went to the 24th Sonic birthday celebration at Sega Joypolis in Odaiba. It was nice, but the game they were mostly promoting was Sonic Runners (which I already had anyway). Jun Senoue from Crush 40 was there and the music was awesome and we ran into by chance and we got a photo with him and he mentioned us on his Twitter! I also bought a new Sonic bag and yse it for work. Anyway, there was a decent turnout.

IMO, I think that no matter what Sega does, the fans will NEVER be satisfied and I think it's because they don't know WHAT they want and the community seems to be divided. It feels like Sonic fans are all over the place.

"We want something new!" *get a new style game*
"We hate that! We want the old Sonic style back!" *Sonic 4 is released*
"That game was so so, we want something unique!*. *Sonic Unleashed is released*

Etc.

So yeah, I don't feel it's Sega's fault for Sonic's multiple directions...I blame the fans.

The problem being that current day Sonic fans aren't Sonic fans because of the games and they simply aren't smart enough to realize that. People have nostalgia for the original games, but they're average at best. 2 is the best one (and my favourite) and half of that game is garbage. Because they have nostalgia for something that can't hold up, Sega makes similar and decent versions of that style of game - Sonic Advance, Sonic Rush, Sonic 4 (though this one has a lot of issues) and people aren't really feeling it, because...guess what? You can't recreate a feeling of quality that didn't exist in the first place. The people still clamoring for good Sonic games were children when the Genesis was out and they're asking for Sega to make something they've never ONCE done - make a great Sonic game.

They make "different" Sonic games in the style of Adventure, or Unleashed or whatever and the fans hate it, because it isn't well made or good enough. Why? Because they're fooling themselves into thinking Adventure of Adventure 2 were actually good games and not rose-tinted turds with semi-brilliant moments of automatic Sonic gameplay that pulled the wool over their eyes 15 years ago. Nostalgia (or sheer ignorance) won't allow people to realize their Sonic "holy grails", like 2,3,S&K and the Adventure series, actually aren't very good.

It doesn't help that every time Sega manages to do something decent with the series they find a way to completely ruin it. Generations is far and away the best Sonic game made in the last decade, perhaps of all-time, and the back half of that game is a f*cking train wreck! The last boss is among the worst I've ever played in ANY game.

Simply put, Sega caught lightning in a bottle with Sonic in the 90's. He was marketable, he was cool and he was backed up by a decent game that had enormous success based almost entirely on genius marketing, not because of quality. Mario became a huge success because the games were consistently excellent, not because Nintendo shoved him in kids faces and said "THIS IS COOL! THIS IS WHAT YOU WANT!" Now that Sonic is perhaps the furthest thing from "cool and marketable," Sega struggles to find any possible way to make him relevant to a general audience, hence nearly two decades worth of trash heap garbage with an increasingly irrelevant mascot slapped on it and confused fans who don't understand why Sega won't just make Sonic "good" again, when they've followed the status-quo and made those "good" Sonic games half a dozen times to absolutely ZERO fanfare.

Welcome to the Sonic fanbase!

I agree, Peanut. You put into words what I think of Sonic at the moment. I played the old genesis games for the first time in years recently. They're still fun to play, but they're not as good as I remembered them. I think their soundtrack makes them better than they actually are. Most of them were rushed out for release.

You can't even contribute anything worth a damn to threads you create.

It's pretty much the fan base that's killed sonic. Like really have you guys seen the creepy fan art, fan fiction, furries and of course CWC?!?! The list could go on and on, let Sonic die and let us remember it for what it was.

Agreed. The fan base is broken. It didn't help that there were many different Sonic continuities made in the 90s like SatAM and Fleetway.

No, you just don't know the power of Sanic Hegehog.

Guess it's a matter of opinion. Every time I play, I still get the same feeling I did when I was a kid. My heart still races when doing a water level and trying to find a bubble. i still get fired up in Sonic 3 when doing the bonus stage and an adrenaline rush when it speeds up. Oh and that feeling I got when veating Sonic 2 the first time at like 10 is nearly the same as now. *2 is my fav* The music also helps. The only downside is that I can't play on a Genesis anymore and have to resort to using an emulator. *Thinks*. Ok, I guess Sonic & Knuckles isn't as fun as I recall...

That aside, I can only partially agree with Peanut as I still feel the older games are good. I don't think I've ever played a Sonic game that I disliked, although granted, I haven't played as many as most have and I'm a very casual Sonic fan.

Getting down to it, at this point, I don't think it's the games that draw me to Sonic, but the characters themselves. I really like the Sonic characters.

As terrible as all those things are, none of them made Sega develop almost nothing but terrible Sonic games since the series's conception.

I still feel it's because Sonic fans don't know what they actually want and the fact that we have many Sonic outlets and continuities splitting people.

I'm not sure if it's that Sonic fans don't know what they want, I think it's more of a divide of what they do want. As a whole, we cannot agree. I want more Sonic Adventure styled games. I liked the 3D thing, and I really think if Sega put their minds to it, they could figure out how to make it work better. I realise I'm in a minority with this opinion.

Some fans preferred the 2D sidescrolling, such as the classic levels in Generations. I'd be just fine with more games like that too, but whenever we get one, I'm disappointed because, again I'm a minority in that I like Sonic's friends and I want to play as them. I don't want to run through the whole game as just Sonic, it bores me. Tails and Knuckles were much more fun.

But a lot of people JUST want Sonic and they don't want the games to be bogged down with tons and tons of characters. The games that were more character-heavy like Heroes and 06 were indeed too much, but I think the two Adventure games did okay. I wouldn't want more than six unless it was some sort of spinoff [like Riders], and depending on the gameplay that may be too much as well. In a 2D sidescrolling Sonic I wouldn't want more than four. Sonic Advance pulled this off wonderfully. Sonic Rush did a great job too and it only had two.

There's a huge split in what people want and I don't run into many Sonic fans that can agree on anything. Like, I was even about to make a statement that Sega couldn't go wrong with a Generations-esque game but with the option to play as Sonic/Tails/both with an option for local or online players to take control of Tails... But not everyone will agree, even on an awesome concept like that.

I also think it'd be a very nice idea if they, perhaps, improved upon Lost World's formula and gave the option for a player 2 to pick up the Gamepad and control Tails, which eliminates the problem of player 2 losing track of Tails. I think this idea would work great on the 3DS as well. I'm really attached to that idea because I played a lot of Sonic 2 and unless you don't want all the Chaos Emeralds, you're finding someone to play Tails for you.

But y'know, more than any of that, can I just have a new Chao Garden? Online trading and competitions? Expanded garden capacity? New types, maybe? PLEASE?

It's an opinion if you enjoy the games or not, sure, but you need to realize that you can like and be way into something that isn't great. You can still love something to death and admit that it is, objectively, not very good. You're saying you enjoy underwater Sonic levels, but they're mechanically abhorrent and almost universally despised. Take a step back and realize that while you have every right to enjoy it, that doesn't absolve it of all the missteps those levels take in terms of design and playability. I enjoy Tecmo Koei's musou games, but that doesn't mean they're good games. I'm also not saying the original series of Sonic games is bad, but they're the perfect example of decent games that are haunted by overblown nostalgic reverence that they don't deserve, which is why nothing Sega does will ever live up to them.

And your last point proves my previous opening statement accurate; a majority of Sonic fans these days are attracted to the franchise by the characters, something video game enthusiasts despise, because Sonic's sh*tty friends are synonymous with the perceived downfall of he series quality and integrity. That immediately creates an issue for Sega and it's continuously a battle for them to do anything that will please anybody.

I mean...they've been trying to do it for almost 20 years and they never once got it right. How many more times can they f*ck up the same thing before people realize it'll never work out? The best they've done are the modern Generations levels, and they're a simplified and straight forward version of the 3D on-rails stuff they were doing with the Wii games. They can't do the open-ended Adventures stuff, they just can't. Either they don't have the ability and skill, or Sonic just can't be properly adapted to that style. I think it's honestly both.

I don't think the issue is that the characters exist or are playable, as awful as they all are, but it's that their gameplay implementations are horrendous. If any of that stuff had been great (or even servicable) in Adventure, I don't think the "Sonic and his sh*tty friends" stigma would be hanging around today, but Sega absolutely sh*t the bed on all that stuff. People are way quicker to forget the good stuff (Generations has been entirely forgotten in the wake of Lost World and Sonic Boom) and way longer to forget Rogue The Bat.

Playing Sonic 3 & Knuckles combined. Still a fun classic!

From Sonic's official YouTube channel:

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/wat.../1100-6428895/

Umm...

I have to admit, that made me laugh.

I'm a little worried about Sonic's future. Back then we got a lot of good stuff like SatAM, the OVA/movie, Sonic CD, and the Archie Comics (once they stopped making the comic a joke and were serious for once), Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Sonic R, and Tails Adventure. For me at least, I think the 3D era is what started to kill off Sonic. The games stopped being fun starting sometime after Sonic Heroes. The designs after that became atrocious and too cartoony, gameplay was increasingly frustating, the series got rebooted into Sonic Boom, and the Penders' lawsuit caused the comics to be rebooted during a very good and exciting storyarc (I can feel Ian Flynnn's pain on having to scrap what you're writing due to a stupid copyright claim). While the comics are not bad, and I have seen at ONE decent episode of Sonic Boom, the future of Sonic doesn't seem to be going good. It might be deader than dead in a few years like Crash Bandicoot was due to the radical changes that Radical Entertainment put him through.

I dunno about Sonic's future, but I know I've been giving his current show "Sonic Boom" a chance over the week. I don't think it's any good at all.

First of all, :lol: to Shia's DLC. Now watch, they're going to make him a Smash Bros character. I can already imagine his tagline:

Shia does it again!!!

In all seriousness though, I really have no problems with Sonic Heroes, Unleashed, Generations, or Colors. The first one I really like because of nostalgia, the second feels like a final game, and then the last two are pretty loved by a lot. I keep saying to give Sonic a rest, Sega I feel should experiment with their other franchises like Nights, try to increase interest to leave the blue blur down. I honestly want Sonic to rest, otherwise the legacy of the character will be infamous.

If there's a way to improve the series, why not go with a game with a tone of the 90s show (NOT THE GOOFY ONE) with some good comedy? Maybe mix in a style similar to Sonic Rush and possibly Generations with it's 3D. You could make your own character helping Sonic and his friends in this world trying to save all. I don't know if this would be a good game idea, but food for thought.

I like Sonic Generations. I liked the classic style better, but the modern style was okay. I think it's one of the only good new Sonic games out there. I'm telling 'ya, the New Super Mario Bros. formula could work.

It depends on tastes. I can see why some people don't like it but I find certain episodes to be either entertaining to meh. I enjoy it more than I enjoyed Sonic X.

Sega, in my opinion, should give their other franchises a chance. I would love to see a new Streets of Rage more than anything from them. But it's also a double edge sword when in North America, Sonic is their only IP that sells. How much would the All-Stars Racing sell if it didn't have Sonic's name on the title? So I can see why Sega releases so many Sonic games but I also believe that they have to try to give another IP a shot.

I think it has more to with the fact that Sega dosen’t have the time and budget to create a game that people want. Just look at the reputation of the fan games out there; Sonic Fan Remix had several websites like Kotaku and Wired asking why the official Sonic 4 didn’t look as good. Sonic After the Sequel got a lot of praise…it was even popular enough to have it’s own article on Wikipedia. Even the Sonic-styled original game, Freedom Planet, has received lot of praise from critics.

Ignoring that, Sonic's reputation from 2010 to 2013 was improving with games like Sonic Colors, Sonic Generations and Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed…and then Sonic Lost World and almost everything Sonic Boom happened.

I think the series reputation can be fixed, but it would take years of constant successful games to do it and Sega's own reputation leaves doubt on that ever happening. There is hope, Sega has stated that they plan to stop rushing games out and Sonic Team (Sonic Lost World was made by a different team) hasn’t made a Sonic game since Sonic Generations in 2011. Everyone is expecting a game from them in 2016 to celebrate Sonic’s 25th anniversary, so let’s wait and see what the future brings.

They already tried that. It's called Sonic the Hedgehog 4.

Speaking of the Sonic Boom TV series, what's wrong with it?

First of all, it's filled with idiotic plots, the characters (especially Knuckles) have been dumbed down a lot, and it overdoses on the comedy but underdoses on the plot and action. It feels like a really, really bad Nick/Disney sitcom or Sonic fanfiction. And don't get me started on Shadow, who feels like a Vegeta ripoff now...

Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog may have been really stupid, but at least I could take Robotnik somewhat seriously (like in the episode where he nearly succeeds in blowing up major Mobian transports [an airport, a train crossing control centre, and a lighthouse]). This one...he becomes roomies with Sonic and Tails, and tries to be Sonic's sidekick. (Seriously? What the shell were they thinking?)

This show is almost as bad as Teen Titans GO! .