WarTraveller

They should just let renowned developers who have made good games for them make a Sonic game. Like Platinum makes a hack and slash, or Atlus makes a Sonic RPG. Fursona. XD And, perhaps more importantly, LET THEM FINISH THE DAMN THING AND NOT RUSH IT FOR A NOVEMBER RELEASE, GOD

Really, they'd probably do that if the film was somehow successful. They have a long history of burying their head in the sand and forgetting things ever happened. But when they do that, they don't learn the lessons they frankly should have learned decades ago. Lessons like, "Don't rush games to market for quick profits" and "Don't give your license to any old developer, especially those who don't understand the source material". It's this stubbornness that has led to Sonic being this joke propped up by nostalgia and memes. They could have fixed this, and yet...they didn't. That's not to say the blame is entirely on them in this case. Hell, it's barely on them in this case. Paramount knew from the VERY FIRST teaser that people despised the design, they had months upon months to pull the "we're going to fix this honest" stunt. But they went with it anyway, so sure their vision was superior to those of the fans or even Sega themselves. It's not even uncaring so much as it is arrogance, Nintendo levels of it. This isn't SEGA's thing, or the fans' thing like Detective Pikachu is. No, this is Paramount's thing. Their ugly, probably toy-shilling thing. I'm at least very happy that they agreed to change up the design, but now I'm just sort of worried for all the animators who will be working endless hours of (very likely unpaid) overtime to fix an issue that never needed to be one in the first place. Considering Sega's track record of game quality, I find that quite unlikely.

See, why doesn't he look like that for most of the film? Why is it that they're doing what they did with Luthor in Batman v Superman?

I'll say this, though. Carey is clearly having a ball as Eggman.

Hoooooooooo boy. They actually went for Ganster's Paradise. They could not have chosen a worse-fitting song.

So, uh, when ARE We getting a trailer for this thing, anyway?

I can't believe this film is actually looking decent. Perhaps for the first time a video game movie will in some way resemble the game it's based on. Woooow. And really, I'm just impressed they managed to find a way to render the Pokemon as close to real life as possible and still make them...look good.

So I got some more news, seems Toy Network, who already have the rights to Sonic plushies as-is, got the rights to make toys based off of the movie, too. So we'll be getting some plush toys of Gremlin Movie Sonic.

I guess. At this point you have to make your own fun in the franchise to really get anywhere. You have to create your own entertainment. So...what do we do? What plans shall we form? How shall we save the Bandaged Blue Blur?

To be honest, I wouldn't trust them to do that. I was already a bit worried about the Crash and Spyro remakes. They were still Activision products, and recent events have proven Activision has no shame and no soul. They would do anything to brutally montize the remakes. But thankfully, they backed off and the remakes were incredibly good. They were made by talented development groups and published by someone who actually gave them some space. Sega and Sonic Team? Very different story. After Rise of Lyric and Big Red Button in general, I doubt Sega is very trusting of outsourcing Sonic to that many third-party developers, with the exception of Sumo Digital (even though they totally screwed Big Red Button over and let them become the scapegoat), so it would be made by whatever remains of Sonic Team. And this is SEGA. Alongside their wretched mandates that just forbid half of what made the Adventure games so special, they just can't not screw up, they must ruin SOME part of it. They would probably make changes people would actually hate...or like. That's kind of the issue. Split fanbase aside, Adventure 1 and 2 can't be shot-for-shot remakes - what worked for the time doesn't work now, as many many many Youtube videos just love to point out over and over. So the questions really come out; What do you keep the same from the originals? What do you change? What do you do with the story beats that didn't work? How do you modernise gameplay styles even Sega doesn't understand? What do you do with Big the Cat? You can't keep his gameplay the same, everyone hates it, but he's also really popular again so you can't just remove him. Do you bring back as many of the old cast as possible or just use the current cast? Or even a new cast of soundalikes? How do you shoehorn Zavok in, as apparently he's a main character now? And more questions besides. It would perhaps make more sense for the games to be a reimagining (or as Mike suggested, more of a reboot) more than a straight remake. With story beats retconned and a good amount of the old actors either dead or unwilling (or in Drummond's case, unable) to work with the franchise, it kind of has to be. But frankly, at this point, I feel that whatever choice they make, it will be the wrong one. It's the only kind of choice they've been making for the last eight years.

Boom was a victim of restructuring. Synergy, the original pitch and the original version of RoL were clearly full adventure, on the same lines as Jak and Daxter or Ratchet and Clank. Just full, tennis balls to the wall adventure with some slightly darker tones. But when the show was pitched as a lighter comedy where the main joke is that every character is one, the rest of the sub-franchise was muddled and messed with to support this new direction (doubtless spurred by RoL's troubled development). So what we're left with is a dumb show about dudebros draped over the skeleton of something more serious. It was restricted by SEGA to be the thing they wanted it to be (another way to sell toys) rather than what it truly was. As much as I hate Boom for tainting the franchise and making Classic all the more enticing, I feel sad it never got the chance to truly express itself in the way RoL clearly was set up to.

Well...Disney never tried. But if they did, I'm certain they'd devote years of thought and testing into making him look right in live-action. Like the Detective Pikachu stuff. It's clear they spent a long time working out how they should look, how they should cross the barrier between cartoony and fictional and cartoony yet almost real. This Sonic design, on the other hand, feels like some bigwigs sat down and went, "Let's make it HYPER-REALISTIC, to make him look cool and edgy! Let's REALLY Micheal Bay this one! No-one cares! It's just for kids!" I mean, I wanted an anthro Sonic, sure. I'm fine with the noodle limb style, but I know a lot of people are not. And with good reason; I do sometimes wonder if the stories to 06 and Shadow would have been a bit easier to tolerate if the characters were full anthro instead of...well, 90's era platform mascot stuff. But there's a decently thick line between anthro as we know it, and making something as realistic as possible, for no other reason than because you can. And they Drop Dashed across that line anyway. Also, a friend of mine found some spiel from Richmond Lee where he goes into detail on why this design is as it is. It's worth reading, check it out; https://twitter.com/Richmond_Lee/status/1072912281401360384

That should have happened after 06. And Rise of Lyric. And Forces. It did not. Look, I wasn't expecting much from the film, I thought Sonic would look like Blue-Core!Sonic, but slightly worse. But THIS?! They didn't even get the shoes right. He's not wearing socks. It's actually 96.3% wrong. I can only hope and pray it looks better in motion. But it probably won't.

Oh dear. Oooooooooh dear.

Okay, so after a bit of a chat with @Wulfsbane elsewhere, I came up with another question we could look into. It's safe to say that Scourge is an example of Good Idea, Bad Execution. An anti-Sonic with all of his drive and snark (but pointed in the other direction) sounds like a good foil for Sonic, but Scourge never really felt like he was linked to Sonic. Personally I hated him for being a womanising scumbag buried in bit of Plot Armour, but that's neither here or there. So I'm gonna ask; How would you write Scourge, or really any attempt at a supposed Anti-Sonic?

Oh, and Sonic talks in that scene, too! https://www.sonicstadium.org/2018/10/sonic-talks-in-latest-ralph-breaks-the-internet-trailer-watch-here/ Now to sit here and wait for people to say that Sonic's few seconds of relevance in this film will be better than the entirety of his own. XD

It only took them three rushed products of infamous quality to get there. I guess the same stubborness from the 90's never left. Still though, it's for the best Team Racing is getting delayed; Sonic has...a history with deadlines (almost as if they keep making them too short or something), and even a few weeks ago people were saying it was the same old unfinshed rushjob as ever. It's for the better. I mean personally, I don't really care either way. TSR just sort of fails to impress me. But then after Forces, anything would. I might just get Transformed instead. I hear that's pretty top-tier.

Eh, it's probably still better than living in Manchester.

You say that perhaps tying it so close the games was a bad idea after all. I want IDW to be good, but it fails to be more than...passable. At most.

I mean he's not even Sally Acorn! How dare he, the philistine! XD See, this is kind of why I didn't want the IDW comics to just be the games but not. Why I would rather it had gone in its own direction from the very start. The connection to the games drag the comic down, rather than enhance it. Ironically, Sonic is probably one of the few franchises where not sticking to the source material makes for a better product. The issue is that comics rely on good stories, and Sonic games don't have stories anymore, moreso a particuarly agravating string of handwaves until the minimum runtime is reached. The characters are basic if not outright cardboard-flat, the stories are pointless bordering on maddening at times, and any potential it may have is quashed by paranoia, a need for control and Values Dissonence, as is the case with Japanese-published games. In other words, the story to the games are rubbish, and cannot translate into mediums where storytelling and characters take centre stage. Metal Sonic has become a go-to textbook-type character, like Shadow, Amy and Green Hill Zone. He's only really there because he has to be, because people (well, kids) recognse him. But because he and Shadow are just fanservice, just window dressing to wave in front of the audiance for cheap praise, they're given no time to develop and they feel less like characters and more like some suit's plaything. A collection of polygons and textures used pragmatically to bump up the Metacritic scores a few points. It's why I was so angry when they brought back Chaos for Forces, and did nothing with him. He might as well have not even been there. And, if you want to be pedantic, he wasn't. That's not to say the writing in IDW!Sonic is the worst, I actually think it's not that bad considering the circumstances. They even have good characters in Whisper and aspects of Tangle. And I do appreciate Metal taking centre stage, finally getting a proper super form and actually feeling in-character (moreso than Boom Shadow, at least). But ultimately the writing can't be "good"; not with the wretched source material it's stuck with, buried further in mandates. Mandates that they said wouldn't be there and that SEGA would take things "step-by-step". Yep, saw straight through that little lie. Because of this, of ALL this, IDW!Sonic just feels...empty. Uninspired. It's the same old stuff any Sonic story in any of the games would follow, just written slightly better. I can't even bring myself to be angry about it, as I saw all this coming the moment they made it clear it was game-inspired. There's nothing to the game stories, so there's just nothing to this. Why do people want the Freedom Fighters to return, to live in this...creative wasteland?

That I'm aware of. If I may say so, they're a little bit...delusional. No, what I'm referring to is rumours that someone in IDW is trying to add politics into the comic and are getting into fueds on Twitter about it with people. Don't know who, though some say it's Flynn behind it. Apparantly he's had a history of doing this...supposedly. It's probably made up, for all I know. Actually on reflection, it's probably hogwash. Probably just bitter Archie fans sad that Sally is basically gone now.

I've been hearing that there have been some issues within the IDW comics. Supposedly someone is trying to insert their politics into it and everyone's falling out and Ian Flynn is apparantly evil now? Can anyone confirm any of this?

That depends on wherever or not he knows exactly what caused the events that led to his future. If he had a hard time tracking them down at the time they happen, why would he go even further back to an extent where any number of possabilities lead to the one event that leads to his future? He could mess up and change the wrong thing and then screw things up even further. The so-called Butterfly Effect. Alongside that, the 16 million cosmic rectons that happen in the comic's history very much means that whatever beginning the comics had when it started, it sure as hell isn't that anymore. Who knows what further changes have been made (regardless of wheverever or not it follows the game "story" closer, as the Shattered World saga shows even then it didn't happen in the order it did for us).

I...don't really have much to say. I wasn't around for it. I watched Underground, instead. Kind of goes to show how much SEGA really thought of it when Underground was its replacement. While I don't love SATAM like a lot of older fans do, I do still appreciate what it tried to do, where it succedded, and where it could have been improved upon in later series. I just...don't really think of it as much as everyone else. It IS the best Sonic cartoon to date, still...not like that's saying much. I do think it's pretty sad that SEGA seemingly wants to forget it ever existed. Not even a mention on their Twitter page. I mean, really think about that. The 10th Birthday of Sonic 06 got a mention, kiss scene and all. As if we needed another reminder of that a full decade on. But the 25th birthday of something people actually, genuinely enjoyed? Nothing. That's gotta sting.

It's still using oversized mammory glands and small amounts of bodily cloth to sell supposedly terrible chicken wings coated in a spiced sauce. I'm not exactly sure HOW different it can be when that is the general concept behind it. Of course, that said, how does it differ in Japan?