Oh Sonic... here we go again...

[Rökkan]

Literally Sonic Team gave the fans what they were bitching about for the past ten years and it came out pretty well. It's enjoyable, but it has very fustrating moments (like every sonic game ever) but can be really fun at times.

Excuse me Rags, but I have been trying really hard not to put these arguments in my post a few pages back, because I was trying to argue why the game was not really that good by itself and not rely too much on arguments about fans and put arguments that would sound more like hate directed at the game's title instead of dislike and disappointment because the game is legitimately not very good.

For 10 years, the fans have been telling SEGA about what Sonic is about. Momentum. Building speed. Physics. I've seen lots of people detailing very clearly everything that is wrong with Sonic and sending to SEGA, but none of that changed anything at all at how SEGA made their games.

SEGA chose (that's the keyword right here) to not follow this during these years because it's too complicated to re-do engines when you can just lazily rework on the Adventure engines and the game will still have its sales high, and also because building momentum and all is just too uninteresting to newer players.

Uninteresting? Yeah, uninteresting. Why caring about building speed on your own if you got speed boosters everywhere on the level design pulling you forward, why worrying when to time your jumps if you got homming attacks? Those, for most players, are just little details that doesn't really matter. Players will be content by just seeing how fast and radical Sonic can go automatically instead of actually being responsible for going through loops and corkscrews with your own speed, that you worked to get it.

So Sonic 4 is also that to an extent. Why bothering doing this game to work like the classics if we can just make them nostalgia trip? See, we don't have to study the classics and know how they work, that would take time, so let's use our usual mediocre level design instead. Plus we can still please people that wants the classic Sonic back by just putting a bunch of levels and rehash a ton of things from the old games so that they can go "hey, I know this! :--)". And the worst thing is that it worked.

In fact, if you see Takashi Iizuka's descriptions of the game, you'll notice that he sounds like a schizofrenic guy trying to describe it. Things like "It's classic but it's modern!" and "It has the classic style of gameplay with the new gameplay that made Sonic what he's known for!". Excuse me Iizuka, are you trying to say that this frankenstein game you're describing is a sequel to the originals or not?

Oh, and also SEGA taking a new direction with the franchise? Listening to the fans and the critics? Being all so nice and wonderful? Yeah, this is just their usual double-speak, saying what you want to hear and falling for it. When Sonic 4 leaked, everyone complained about a ton of stuff. So they said that they would delay the game for four months to work on all of the complaints. All that they did was to remove and re-do two levels that everyone complained. Every other change was merely cosmetic to give the impression that they care and put time and effort into it. That's why the delay was so huge, so that they had enough time to re-build the hype for Sonic 4 and to give the impression like they are taking their time into the game.

For fuck's sake, for the last 10 years, all that the fandom had been doing was lots and lots of fangames, only imagining what it would be like if SEGA actually came back to classic Sonic and there was a sequel to Sonic 3. Those fan-games are very well known, specially by SEGA of America and there's an expo every year showing the progress on engines and showcasing new fangames or hacks. They mostly all have the same elements that every fan would want a Sonic 4 to have, and SEGA did not include ANY OF THEM. They had the opportunity to actually look what the fans would want for Sonic 4 very clearly, taking their unfinished games and ideas and just do a full game with them, merging all of their ideas and improving them, making a game with much better quality, that only a huge team in a successful game company could make. But they didn't. Really Rags, did they literally threw at us what we were really wanting? I suppose so, since everyone is just swallowing this bullshit.

Oh, let's just not forget that Sonic Retro actually reverse-engineered all classic Sonic games and made an easy guide on how to reproduce the same programming of every single game with different programming languages and sent it to SEGA, and what did they do with it? Absolutely nothing. Sonic 4 came out completely ignoring the guide. But don't worry, SEGA listens to their fanbase very closely, they know what you want and they are implementing all of the fanbase's wishes, aren't they? After all, they just delivered what we wanted after 15 years of mostly disappointments and rushed games. An iPhone port.