it was never good.
There’s a distaste the broader culture develops around a property when they get the feeling that it has a fan-base bigger than what the quality of the thing warrant (see: twilight). If there’s a franchise that has a massive, incredibly rabid fan-base but the entries in that franchise are all mediocre at best the go-to line is “that franchise should just get back to when it was good”. And I’m here to spoil for you why Sonic doesn’t get back to when it was good.
The problem is it was never good.
People aren’t fans of Sonic bc the games were good. Most people who are fans of Sonic never played a Sonic game they liked, or even played one at all. They’re fans bc of its marketing.
A 15 year old in 2009 wasn’t posting OC bc the old games were good – they’d never played the old games; they had never even seen an NES. They were posting OC bc before they had a PC with MS paint, their parents bought them coloring books & they spent their free time before they had a PC making Sonic OC on Sonic coloring books.
The games were never good to begin with tho. All of the best Sonic games of all time had exactly 1 good level each. Sega spent an obscene amount of time & energy marketing the franchise – they even went so far as to collaborate with Michael Jackson in several ways (the character is partially based on him), but in terms of actually making the games they only put in the time & effort of making 1 good level for each game, made it the first level which everyone would play the most bc the game would kick you back to the main menu when you ran out of lives and then just shipped it.
TLDR; the games were never good, Sonic only had its fandom bc of the coloring books, there is no golden age of “Good Sonic Games” to go back to & if you’ve spent your whole life thinking or mis-remembering that there was you have been fooled by a marketing ploy.
Fuck you sonic 2 is a masterpiece this is the worst take i have ever heard on here, 1 good level jesus christ, emerald Hill, chemical plant, mystic cave, metropolis zone with the crabs and praying mantiseses, the fucking metal sonic followed by walking boss thing. Not to mention the thing where you go real fast and the screen has to catch up. Also if you run out of lives on sonic 2 you suck at games.
Of course everything after the mega drive is complete trash except for sonic mania but every one knows that anyway.
I’ve always noticed that conversations around this topic focus on the console games. Sonic games on the Gameboy Advance and DS were some of the best imo. I even preferred Sonic Colors on the DS to the console version.
bc those are RPGs with a sonic the hedgehog skinpack
None of those games are RPGs, the only sonic RPG is Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood and probably a bunch of RPGMaker fangames of varying quality. The rest of the GBA/DS Sonic Games were 2D platformer Sonics of varying degrees of similarity to the genesis titles
I’m not even a sonic fan and I know this doesn’t hold water. People do genuinely love these games. You can say it’s based in nostalgia, or you can point out that different people think whichever one they played as a kid was the peak of the franchise, or make a case that it’s not “organic” success (as if such a category even makes sense in the capitalist cultural marketplace), but it’s completely wrong to say that fans of the series have never actually played the games.
This smells a lot to me like /v/'s attitude of “I don’t enjoy this game, and it’s literally incomprehensible that anyone has different tastes from my own, so they must all be lying to me and to themselves.”
it also never came out on NES, so im guessing OP wasnt around when it was first released. probably thinks the 90s where one big vaporwave pepsi ad too
i actually really like the first 3 sonic games & have defended them in these comments lol but most ppl posting OC on deviantart when they were tweens had never played the original 3 that everyone says were the only good ones bc they came out b4 they were born.
Why wouldn’t they have played them? Emulators have been around forever, and the games have been rereleased a zillion times. Just because they weren’t born early enough to have played the original release doesn’t diminish their fandom.
bc they werent old enough to have played Sonic when it came out on the NES in 1983
NESticle came out in 1997 though, so the only people who couldn’t play Sonic when they were growing up are millennials from 1984-1996
I demand a return of downvotes specifically so I can downvote this horrendous take
I remember playing and liking some sonic games. Wasn’t an all time fave but it was cool
Same, but not good =/= not fun & fun =/= good. A dung beetle can have endless fun with a pile of my shit, I wouldn’t take that as proof of its objective quality as a work of entertainment
Counterpoint: the only objective measure of a work of entertainment’s quality is how much fun(entertainment) it elicits in its consumer
then by that same logic nazism is a very good political ideology bc a lot of ppl believe in it. Ppl are capable of being wrong.
We are discussing works of entertainment, not political ideologies, to apply the same logic of evaluation of quality to both is illogical
Doesn’t people’s enjoyment of Sonic Mania kinda go in the face of this whole idea?
no, bc idk what that is & will refuse to learn just to spite u
It was a retro style Sonic game that was massively successful and considered to be one of the only good Sonic games of the past few years
