rev up the sonic cycle: Sonic Mania

[Kriven]

they have yet to make a universally praised game that is seen as a classic.

And they never will because of how fractured the fanbase is. Everything you said is "wrong" and "bad" about SA2 is everything that makes me want to go back to it. Sonic's Friends having just as many levels as Sonic? I thought they needed more levels. Sonic and Shadow's levels are all, IMO, smartly designed. Would I play and love a whole game of Tails/Eggman/Gamma shooting mode? You bet your damn ass I would.

Sonic will never star in a universally praised game, because the audience for the games are split into at least three groups:

Genesis Fans (they might like the Advance games. Maybe the Rush games) -- these guys like the classic, Sonic-Only, 2D, no-story speed platforming experience. If they're smart, they appreciate the way the Genesis games also forced you to slow down and handle some puzzles and genuine platforming. The games from this era are very tonally different, and put a certain emphasis on the cute and varied cast of Badniks Sonic comes up against.

Adventure Fans - Obviously the Adventure games, but you can probably include Heroes and Shadow the Hedgehog (and Sonic 06...) in this group. This is where the first split happened: a certain percentage of people who liked Genesis Sonic (like me) also fell in love with the Adventure series. And a certain percentage said "WTF is this shit?" and left. And a certain percentage of people who had never been interested in Sonic suddenly saw the kind of game they would like to play. This franchise tried (and usually succeeded) in honoring Sonic's roots, but it also took things way more in a SatAM direction. The franchise became less cute in general, and an emphasis was put on dramatic storylines as opposed to cartoonish antics. Gameplay was expanded into a variety of different styles, and an emphasis was put on broadening and developing Sonic's cast of supporting characters. This series also introduced the wildly popular Chao Garden--a mode which was out of place, perhaps, but off to the side and inconsequential to those who didn't want to play it.

Unleashed Fans - Some of the Genesis fans who had left came back when Sega started producing the Unleashed style games, while a big number of the Adventure fans left. Sonic Generations even managed to attract some people with its "Classic Style" modes (but in my opinion, these modes fail to capture the spirit or gameplay of Sonic Genesis and are just kind of... awful). This generation is largely defined by a lack of platforming elements and a "Boost to Win" type of gameplay. There really isn't too much difference between these games and the mobile game Sonic Dash. An emphasis has been put on creating a sense of speed, which means that enemies and environments are almost inconsequential as you kind of just blaze past them. The stories have been scaled back to self-contained humorous adventures, and Sonic's group of friends have mostly been removed. These games emphasize the player's score and encourage repeated plays of a stage to memorize and perfect its timing in order to obtain the highest score.


This is without addressing one-offs like Lost World or the fanbases which have developed around Sonic's animated and comic book incarnations (and honestly, the most important entry in the series has--for the past fifteen years--been Archie's comic book series). When you consider all of these different factors, and how each of these little franchises has a whole different audience, you start to see why nothing Sonic does will ever reach universal acclaim. Some of us prefer Adventure and hate Generations, and some of us prefer they just stop making games altogether and just play the Genesis ones, and some of us prefer the modern style of gameplay. Some of us only liked Lost World, some of us liked Sonic Chronicles, some of us like Genesis but don't like Advanced or Rush, and some of us only watched Sonic X, and thousands of us only read the Archie series... and hell, there's probably a certain group of kids now who only like the Sonic Boom series.

Sonic Team can't please all its fans with a single game. They'll have to release a few different games, with each encompassing what fans like of a particular style, if they want to please everybody for that generation.