Okay, here’s the grist of it.
2000-2008
[spoiler]Some of the pricks that put their own personal tastes before the health of the franchise call this the “dark era”. This was because that some people think that having Sonic go into a darker, more realistic perspective is apparently against Sonic’s values, even though the tone of the franchise has no effect on the quality besides how it would appeal to some people.
Some people liked Sonic during this time, and out of those people many left as soon as Sonic started becoming loaded with cancerous fucks like the ones I mentioned earlier.
There were three games that given these guys leverage though. I’ll explain them in the below folders.
Shadow the Hedgehog
[spoiler]Shadow the Hedgehog was supposed to be a game to expand on the most popular character the franchise has back then. Unfortunately the game turned out to cause some people (the cancer faction) to be more triggered than a typical radical feminist. It included guns, swearing, and small amounts of blood when human soldiers were shot up or killed.
Unfortunately due to the repetitive nature of the game, the glitchiness of Shadows abilities while unarmed, and the story being semi-polished and loaded with Shadow acting like a mindless dummy, the game had enough leverage against it for the bad guys to use it to spread their twisted message.[/spoiler]
Sonic 2006
[spoiler]This game is rather infamous for being extremely unfinished, and even worse than the demo from what some people said. The game also had a poorly executed story for Sonic the Hedgehog, which was what the hippies said should always be the main character of the games.
Also there’s a paradox as to how the time travel worked in the game. Throughout the game time travel worked like this - your fate is sealed, if you travel back to the past then you can’t really change anything to determine the fate of the present. But in order to beat Solaris the past, present, and future has to be altered so that he is destroyed at least three times on the timeline.
Because that this game still has the connection of a story that tried to be deeper (and failed because that not enough time was spent on making it good) it was used as justification for making Sonic into the filler-loaded, pastel-colored turd it is today.[/spoiler]
Sonic Unleashed
[spoiler]This was actually a minor game in regards to the story of Sonic’s franchise, but it was still significant due to the fact that it shown some fans wanting to lock the franchise into a linear speedrunning game, without any kind of threat from enemies besides surprise attacks that could easily be countered via memorization.[/spoiler]
[/spoiler]
2009-Today
[spoiler]Sonic has pretty much become the Naruto of the gaming industry. But instead of ever-increasing threats, we see the villains become more and more incompetent as time passes by, and all the other characters treated as filler. In fact, all of the games pretty much have filler be its main storyline, and said filler is mostly jokes and terrible humor.
A lighthearted story isn’t bad in itself. It’s just that Sonic’s stories today waste nearly 99% of the time that the audience would put into viewing it.[/spoiler]
[spoiler]IGN has made some heavily negative statements about Sonic’s games, especially back in the mid-200X and about any game that either tries to add a new piece to its formula or tries to make the audience care about the story.
It would be easy to see that IGN has bias when they get so many of the aspects of the Sonic franchise incorrect (GREEN HILL ZONE FROM SONIC 2 BOIS) and when they talk about the 2D gameplay, they had a more positive tone, but as soon as they talk about SEGA’s “join the resistance” commercial they used words that are more commonly used as insults.
-Gets a lot of stuff incorrect about Sonic’s franchise.
-Praises their own little cubby hole (that was given more than enough coverage) while calling the other product “dark, edgy” when really we know nearly nothing about how good the game would actually be. (The trailer I mentioned earlier was nothing more than words, fire and game models that don’t really explain much about the game’s story.)
-Bias.[/spoiler]
