Rev Up Those Sonic Cycles

[Candescence]

Just jumping into the whole characters debate, the main reason people dislike the use of multiple playable characters these days is that it nearly always turns into a Genre Roulette - Sonic Adventure 2 was practically three different games in one. Heroes had the opposite problem - all four teams were almost exactly the same. Sonic 3&K used the same style of gameplay for each character, but Sonic, Tails and Knuckles each had abilities that made them stand out. The ONLY game that did this in recent memory was Sonic and the Black Knight.

Now, for the characters themselves... Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and Eggman are the bare minimum, I reckon. But beyond that... If there's any character I like to keep, it's Blaze. Aside from that 06, which seriously messes up her supposed backstory to this day despite resetting itself, Blaze has actually had some decent character development in her two games, and she's a surprisingly well-rounded character with a proper personality. Heck, players still learn neat little things about her when we think we know everything (e.g., her fear of heights, as shown in one scene in Rush Adventure). It's part of why she's my favourite character aside from Sonic himself. Hell, playing as her was the only good part about Sonic 06, no joke. It helps that she had the homing attack mapped to a different button than the jump button, and she could perform the friggn' Shinryūken, to boot.

And just to note, Silver was gimmicky, alright, but it was worse than just a simple shoe-horned gimmick, he was a blatant Gravity Gun ripoff that wasn't even fun. There are far less blatant methods of showing off the damn physics engine.