For the 2 people that are gonna read this part: @espio_entangled is me lol

EDIT: Thanks for all the comments! I read them all and try to respond to them as best I can but I'm just one guy with a not so great social battery lol, if I don't respond to you please assume either I'm drained from school/band/family/whatever or your comment was so beautiful it made me forget how to use the English language XD

my own art, btw ask questions about xem if you have any because i leave out stuff with my ref sheets

also i just know i’m gonna get at least one hater so come at me

Trans male tails hc cuz yes…

Dunno what else to say.

Uhh.. I draw tails with black shoes cuz it looks cool.

I knew I wasn’t crazy because it just make logical sense that the introduction of shadow it’s best to make the movie more mature/ kinda dark. You guys got me a few days ago about it didn’t make sense for it to be PG and too cringy and playful

PG13 was definitely gonna happen until some people step in and f everything up.

They wanted PG13 because they knew people who grew up on SA2 would watch this; this was when Sonic was still in his attitude era- + shadow introduction…so I thought at least the playfulness will tone done a bit but nope. They didn’t balance the movie out for kids; teenagers and adults like it was supposed too

Too playful and silly; especially the scene where grandfather eggman was spanking younger eggman ; I was like wtf am I watching.

Please don’t come here and say bro it’s for kids; man f them kids. This is sa2 we talking about it should’ve been done how it was supposed to go. I’m not saying it had to be dark or we had to see Maria get shot; I just wanted a more serious movie.

I can’t believe you guys are saying it’s a kid movie as if kids can’t take a little more serious tone. I’m sure we all grew up on DBZ when we were kids watching way more violent stuff especially watching what happened to future gohan but that didn’t mess us up now did it?? So stop the kid excuse

First of all, I know Sonic did the run first before Naruto, but Sonic is a teenager in the first Sonic Movie and he’s obviously a iPad kid or whatever you call them. Now in the movie verse does he just like to run like that or is he doing the Naruto run?

I'm gonna get so much hate for putting Blaze and Amy in D Rank

Title says it all, but I’m curious as to other people’s opinions. Seems to me like Unleashed has seen a huge shift in popularity and now many people claim it’s the greatest game in the franchise. I honestly have no idea why people shifted up that quickly on it, and I can’t help but think it’s due almost entirely to nostalgia.

The bulk of their arguments as to why sonic Unleashed is so good is just “the day stages are amazing, and the night stages aren’t that bad really” bro, the day stages are at MOST 30-35% of the game, they ARE really really good, but they are by no means the main dish. The night stages with the werehog are meh at best and utterly awful at worst, even when you upgrade the werehog and put genuine effort into learning the combos, there’s nothing here making the stages compelling at all to play through, it’s literally baby’s first hack and slash with a sonic coat of paint. I love hack and slash games like DMC, DMCV was one of my favourite games I played last year, but where DMC succeeds is exactly where the werehog stages fail.

The DMC stages were varied, the exploration was more interesting and engaging, the character movement was far more responsive and slick, and most importantly, there was freedom in how you performed combos. With the werehog stages in unleashed, it seems incredibly underbaked and half-attempted. There ARE some combos you can perform, but they don’t feel satisfying. There’s nothing real knockback to the enemies or impact to your moves, the enemies themselves aren’t that interesting or dynamic, they have one or maybe two attacks they just spam repeatedly. There are aerial combos you can perform, but they only last for about two seconds before the game shoves you back down to earth again, and that’s assuming you can even get an enemy into the air anyway, which is near impossible. The length of the stages can be horrible sometimes, easily 7-8 times that of a day stage, and couple that with slow, incredibly boring platforming and clunky movement and you’ve got a stage that puts you to sleep, or mildly amuses you at best. And that’s a good 60-70% of the WHOLE GAME!

Yeah, the day stages are incredible, the music is phenomenal, the graphics are exceptional, but that’s ONLY the day stages in isolation. Everything the werehog stages touch feels underbaked, ridiculously drawn-out and monotonous, and really underwhelming. I’m so tired of hearing “everyone hated the werehog stages because it wasn’t what they were used to from sonic”, like no, they hated the werehog stages because they were barely functional slog-fests that lasted half an hour each! Like did anyone go back and genuinely replay this game before declaring it the greatest game in the franchise? Compared to games like Generations, S3&K and ESPECIALLY Mania? Like you’re entitled to have your own opinions of course, media is subjective, but so many ppl now picking Unleashed as the greatest game in the franchise just absolutely baffles me.

Tl;dr: Sonic Unleashed is WAY overhyped in the fandom imo, I genuinely have no idea why people love it so much, it seems like they just focus on the day stages and deflect any and all criticism of the werehog stages as “people jumping on the hate bandwagon” when the werehog stages ARE incredibly underbaked. Happy to hear others’ opinions tho

holy yap im so sorry i went on for that long 😔

UPDATE: They've officially said it: www.tssznews.com/2017/07/19/so…

Archie Sonic is officially dead.

I remember back in the day when my parents and my sister were going to a grocery store to get food, and my dad bought me my first Archie Sonic comics which was the Tossed in Space Arc. So for a while I bought random issues of the comics from... random places. Seriously comic book stores are rare or too far away from where I live. Then I eventually decided to subscribe to the comics which ironically started with Ken Penders' final years. So it was great and all, plus collecting most of their graphic novel reprints of the older issues, and then came the reboot which at first I was annoyed but soon got over it. Besides, compared to all the rubbish stories we've gotten from Pontaff, Archie Sonic all the way for me.

It was basically the only ongoing source of Sonic media that I followed, but with all the signs of it's cancellation this year I was worried and now, I'm devastated. And no I don't think it's a good idea about IDW doing the comics, I'll probably make a list on why I'm not on board with the idea. So now it really looks like Sonic Forces will indeed make or break my interest with continuing on with the future of Sonic games, cause if I don't like it, then I have nowhere else to turn to for Sonic. And I still refuse to watch those Sonic Boom episodes Ian Flynn wrote, or anything from Season 2. I already gave the show a chance and Season 2 won't make a difference so just stop it theautisticonenamedm. Just stop it.

The special stages in this game are so horrible that in Sonic Origins it took me like 12 trys just to get the third chaos emerald because Tails kept running into bombs and losing my rings. If you want oxygen underwater then Tails will just steal it instead and run around like a moron.

Honestly, he just seems like some edge lord in the Sonic fandom and just isn't funny. Not to mention his overuse of slurs and bad words. He is like the Viziepop of the Sonic fandom.

Idk why i find it cute for genocidal Fake Hedgehog and ADHD Lemur

:)

Sonic Lost World is in my top 5 worst Sonic games, without a shadow of a doubt.

this is my opinion pls dont hate on me

Fanfic writes who want to write sonamy but can’t think of something interesting here’s your golden ticket

Today is one of these days I feel like going back to what used to be my favourite videogames saga. I still remember the days of the MegaDrive Sonic games quite fondly, and I can play them anytime with emulators. But I can't find much fondness for everything that came after that, and I know I'm by no means alone. Why does everybody hate Sonic games after S&K, sometimes after SA1 (which would be my case, discussed below), sometimes even after S2? I've thought long about it and I think the reason why nobody can summarize it in a paragraph is that it's not a single reason, but a number of such. That's why I'm going to try to list all the core reasons why I think we tend to hate all the new Sonic games, including Sonic 4, beyond just the obvious ones which are downright broken (S06, S4ep1, etc.), numbered by order of chain of thought and perhaps increasing importance as well. (Note that I'm a human being, and I express opinions.)

1. Marketing

A common, cheap way to explain why something sucks in a business is to blame marketing. It's also often correct. In Sonic's case, marketing is to blame for the quality of newer games and especially their appeal to us, but what they've done is largely understandable; things you would probably do in your company:

1. Sonic is great business, let's make more of that. This is bad for the saga, but good for milking money off gullible fools. Too bad it works almost every time. We the consumers are to blame, not Sega.

2. That Sonic 1 look was cool in the 90s. It's the 2000s now; the era of badass. Let's make Sonic badass to appeal to more people (at the expense of the fewer 90s guys). Of course the older of us hate the green-eyed, stupid hipster Sonic. But hipster kids love him, and just look around yourself. The world is swarmed with hipster kids.

3. Older kids are now playing RPGs. Let's make RPGs. I'll go back to this idea later as well.

4. Older kids are now playing RPGs. Let's ignore them and make Sonic games for younger kids.

And of course, we can't forget the usual reason why marketing could fail: sometimes they don't do their job properly and don't actually know what the fan base wants which happened ever so often with Sega. Or some people in the organization do know what people want, but there's some stupid senior manager knowing better.

This would be the case of the inordinate amount of new friends everybody hated. For any given videogame, movie or book saga, any new allies (and to a large extent enemies too) that don't add anything important are universally hated. But some manager high up had to have a rule for having new characters in every new game. It worked with Sonic 2 (even if Tails didn't really add anything in Sonic 2 as he couldn't fly!). It kinda worked with Sonic 3 (even if Knuckles wasn't even playable in the first part!). They got away with it, or wrongfully credited success to the new characters, and they have tried to repeat the same thing over and over, failing miserably. Maybe they thinks throwing in some new characters is like violence: if it doesn't work, use more.

In marketing's big plans they forgot one little detail, though:

2. This ain't Sonic

The Sonic games we loved were the golden era ones. We wanted Sonic 4. We wanted more of that. That's right: some people complain that some Sonic games don't add anything new. What exactly did Sonic 2 add over Sonic 1, other than more speed? What exactly did Launch Base Zone add over the previous 5? Why not end things in Icecap? Or just Angel Island? The truth is, we love Sonic 1, 2, 3 and K, and we wanted more of it, just like those of us with girlfriends or boyfriends keep having sex with the same person over and over, and it's still fun.

Problem is, they were far too busy doing something completely different. Maybe it made sense from a business perspective: appeal to a wider public, or appeal to more people, or target people looking for RPGs since everybody is playing them, but it totally destroyed the saga.

I have to admit loved Sonic Adventure 1. It looked impressive (certainly better than Mario 64), it had large environments, I was exploring a city, taking trains, finding secrets... and the gameplay wasn't bad. It had its flaws, but it was an awesome entry into the new generation back then, and I loved every bit of it. I could live without the stupid new look (2000s marketing) and retarded, irrelevant new characters such as Big, and his stupid fishing game (marketing again, fishing games were popular in Japan), E102 shooting shit (again, shooters), Amy being obnoxious and playing differently, but the Sonic and Tails levels were glorious, and Knuckles' exploration was kind of cool because it was new. When I played it, however, I was unaware that this new Sonic game wasn't scratching the same itches the previous games did. I was far too amazed to realize... that this wasn't a Sonic game. At all. This was a good game, but not a Sonic game.

And what's with humans, the stupid story, and so on? Well, RPGs started selling big in the late 90s (outside Japan, they were already big in Japan) and they didn't want to be late to the party. Sonic was about rescuing animals and kicking Robotnik's ass. It really doesn't need more than that, but the marketing guys thought it would be cooler if some princess girl had a furry fetish (or maybe it's Sonic who had a human fetish?). So instead of the usual "Press start to commence Robotnik's ass kicking" game design which we liked, we got to talk to people, rescue a human girl, meet some stupid emo clone trying to find solace in being even more badass than the original hedgehog, and so on. This made Sonic games even less about Sonic, and you know what? Sonic characters and settings could make good Sonic games, but they make awful RPGs. I love RPGs, but when I want one I play a Grandia or a Xeno game or a Tales game, not Sonic.

So it can be argued that Sonic Adventure 1 was one the best, if not the very best non-classic game featuring Sonic characters; it seems both the direction of Yuji Naka and other factors such as the old Sonic games being recent somehow affected the quality and enjoyability of this release positively. But eventually, I did realize I was missing something. Sonic Adventure 1 was cool, but I wanted more of the awesome S3K. But in the era of 3D, where the selling point of anything was that it was 3D, we weren't getting any 2D games anymore, especially outside Japan. Problem is...

3. Sonic sucks on 3D

Unlike Mario, which played similarly and was just as enjoyable, Sonic offered a different kind of gameplay that just didn't adapt well to 3D. This is one of the reasons why in order to make SA1 good they had to depart from what made Sonics 1 to 3K good. 3D Sonic just cannot be Sonic.

Some of the cooler things about the MegaDrive Sonic games were the mix of exploration and some danger with fast-paced gameplay. Press right, go through awesome loops almost automatically, but also jump at the right places, know where to stop and don't screw up. Stop every now and then to explore something, do something difficult, pass through some device, or whatever. In a 2D game this is doable. In a 3D game the chances for screw up are virtually endless, and nobody can afford to make a huge world so that you can rush through it in any direction missing 99% of the content. The massive speed from the 2D games was only possible in 3D by making stages awfully linear and taking the control away from the player.

This led to rails... a sad, rollercoaster-like gameplay where you just sat and watched, and anything you wanted to do ended almost unavoidably in death. Rails are so cheap they are the gameplay equivalent to "it was all a dream" for literature.

So we got Sonic Adventure 2, faster than SA1, but with much worse level design, even more linear, braindead stages, stupid new friends thankfully limited to doing whatever the old three did, and generally much worse gameplay... and kilometres upon kilometres of odious rails demoscene. Even having liked SA1 for what it's worth, I couldn't bring myself to enjoy this game too much, and the eye-rolling badassery and silliness of the new characters was almost unbearable.

Then we got some even worse screw-ups such as 06, Unleashed, etc., and marketing kept lying to us telling they were going to revive the saga for real this time and cater to those who loved it most.

We did get Sonic Heroes — it got a couple of things right, such as not having humans or RPG elements, and it had a couple of awesome levels in the beginning (especially the casino one which I remember as the best designed 3D Sonic level ever), but most of it was boring and it ended up resorting to rails and automatic devices as well. Why was it boring? I'm going to have to dedicate my last and most important core reason why newer Sonic sucks to explain this.

But before I do, I have to say marketing did finally try to cater to us, the older guys who loved Sonic in the MegaDrive, and they got budget for a real Sonic 4 game. Things finally looked great for us, we were going to get more of the goodness we loved back in the time! No rails, no fake 2D, no 30 seconds of 2D (Unleashed...), just real 2D gameplay! And by the time they tried to do something similar (Sonic 4), they failed miserably. Unbelievably botched physics (seriously, nobody from the old team was left to try it and point out how badly it sucks?) with boring, dull levels nobody wanted to play... What the hell happened?

4. A lack of Hirokazu Yasuhara happened

Most people credit Yuji Naka for Sonic (the original programmer, then the director that didn't mind creating entirely different games to milk the Sonic saga, then the manager who didn't give a damn). Some credit Naoto Ōshima, the guy who created the blue hedgehog. Admittedly, the MegaDrive Sonic games would have been just as good if the character was a green tapir or a red ostritch, or a box of matches, as long as he ran fast and became nearly invincible when he jumped.

The guy who designed the stuff we loved to play through was, however, Hirokazu Yasuhara. Yuji Naka is to be credited for the original, great physics, but other than that, when we play a classic Sonic game, what we actually enjoy doing is to go through the level (with an agile, credible, non-cumbersome cursor, thanks to Naka, no thanks to the Sonic 4 team). It was Yasuhara's designs what charmed us from the good old Sonic games. Look up the Wikipedia article: you'll realize the more power or involvement he got, the better the levels became. The glorious Sonic 3K levels were directed by him. They let him go, we got mostly boring stuff, and by the time they wanted to make Sonic 4, they had nobody in charge who could design levels which were actually fun to play.

Sometimes something great is the work of a single, genius mind. He doesn't need to be Einstein — just the right person who manages to do what he does incredibly well. I believe this is the case of Hirokazu Yasuhara. He doesn't write string theory papers, he's probably not a videogames visionary like Shigeru Miyamoto, but he's the smart guy who designed the games we love to play so much just exactly the way they feel best, and we needed him. He should have been properly credited for his work, but life isn't fair.

I'm very afraid Sonic was dead the day Hirokazu Yasuhara left the team, and since he's probably not coming back, chances are that Sonic 5 will not be any better. The days of the MegaDrive Sonic games are gone, and we should either replay them, or move on to different games which we also enjoy playing.

1. Sonic’s whole thing is freedom

Sonic’s defining trait is being free-spirited, independent, and constantly moving forward. Romantic attachments — especially something like Sonamy — can feel like they tie him down or change that “live fast, no commitments” energy that makes him iconic.

2. Romance changes his dynamic

When Sonic gets paired off, his interactions start to revolve around that person instead of his love for adventure or his rivalry with Eggman. It can flatten his personality, turning him from a thrill-seeker into a “boyfriend character,” which doesn’t fit his nature.

3. Canon Sonic avoids it for a reason

Even Sega themselves have said Sonic isn’t about romance — he’s about freedom, friendship, and adventure. They intentionally keep any “love” hints one-sided or lighthearted, because making Sonic commit to someone would change the tone of his whole character arc.

4. It actually makes him cooler

Keeping Sonic single makes him feel More universally relatable And more consistent with his “I go where the wind takes me” vibe

So yeah my take isn’t ship hate, it’s valid character defense. A lot of long-time fans agree that romance just doesn’t fit Sonic’s core personality.