Sonic The Hedgehog

I'm gonna try and enlighten you about sonic the hedgehog. He was once great and was the star of a generation, now hes a pathetic has-been. Let's take a look at the once-great hedgehog ans think about what could be done to bring him back into the spotlight.

So what the fuck happened to sonic the hedgehog? Since the Dreamcast days sonic has gone completely off the rails because SEGA dont take their own mascot seriously. Sonic still exists for the sole purpose of drawing in more children, when SEGA seem to be forgetting that he's MUCH more powerful a tool at pulling in money from nostalgic gamers who grew up playing the Mega Drive back in the early 90s in what gamers call sonic's golden age.

Why, with a mascot that could be so useful at pandering to both by revisiting old-school side-scrolling with an emphasis on speed and gameplay do they keep churning out SHIT like sonic and the black knight and sonic colours? All sonic has been doing since 2002 has been copying Mario when SEGA should instead be copying NINTENDO and marketing their mascot with a collection of serious games that stand out as the best in their field. I'm no mario fan but i see that mario games are solid, enjoyable platformers filled with catchy tunes and nifty powerups, but when i see sonic running about in sonic colours, changing forms like mario did in mario galaxy, I cant help but get pissed off because that isn't what sonic is about.

You may not be as familiar as me with sonic's backstory (and i wouldn't blame you as he has two official ones) but what is obvious is that he's all about speed and freeing small furry critters from dr. robotnik. So why then starting with sonic adventure was he saving cities full of humans from the evil; DR EGGMAN? Well let me tell you.

Sonic was originally designed by his Japanese creator as living on planet earth, saving his fellow woodland creatures from dr. eggman (that being a legitimate name to a japanese-speaking audience) it was only when he saw a western release that he was moved to the fictional planet Mobius and fought the now-renamed Dr. Robotnik (renamed for the obvious reason that Eggman was a laughable name for an antagonist in an english speaking country) . The games happily kept their stories separate until it came time to bring sonic into the 3d realm with sonic adventure. SEGA's newly appointed "Sonic team" created a rich 3d world for sonic to run around in what was obviously a human-populated planet earth, but when it came time to bring out adventure in the west, fans (like me) were shocked and appauled to find the little blue fellow ripped from his homeland mobius and pitted against Dr. Eggman, who was obviously Robotnik but with a ridiculous name.

This didn't sit well with western fans at all, so when sonic team continued to make sonic games in their version of the sonic universe, it only worked to deepen the void between die-hard sonic fans and the new generation of sonic fans post-dreamcast era. Following the flop of the dreamcast and SEGA being forced to become a software company, Sonic games were now being produced for multiple systems such as the playstation 2, xbox and gamecube, so SEGA naturally had to create sonic games that were accessible to all and didn't require a prior knowledge of sonic canon (which was all over the place by this point). The first game made as such was sonic heroes which, determined to stay in 3d, tried to be a straightforward platformer populated by a cast of sonic's friends who were varied, colourful and most importantly, dull and interchangeable.

The result was a game that flopped BIG TIME, but for some reason SEGA just kept at it, making games like "shadow the hedgehog", based around a one-time rival of sonic riding a motorbike and shooting guns. SEGA, finally taking the hint, made a sonic game that looked set to revitalize the franchise for the release of the xbox 360 and ps3 titled simply "sonic the hedgehog", they just made a few fatal flaws: It was in 3d and still featured humans and irritating "friend" characters. Sonic has never translated well to 3d as his main thing is speed, running about 3 dimensional levels at any speed tends to create a lot of problems that aren't there in 2d. Levels have to be "tracks" with obvious boundaries so sonic can move speedily but not get lost, not a problem in 2d as you can only go left or right, but in 3d this means a lot of samey, dull levels that limit your ability to explore.

The second problem, with keeping the humans and other characters is that this was not the backstory us westerners had grown up with, having cute woodland creatures fight the humans (well, human) created the obvious dichotomy of animals = good, humans = bad. Having a whole load of humans just didnt make sense and made sonic look ridiculous in contrast to all of the people wandering about like he was ripped right from a different world. The inherant problem with the ever-growing numbers of support characters is that they not only draw focus from sonic, the primary reason people buy sonic games, they were never in any given title for long enough to develop a back story or real relationship with sonic or eachother. Tails had been around since sonic 2, we know him as the sidekick, knuckles is sonic's rival , but when SEGA went overboard trying to draw in new fans and introduced rouge the bat, e-102, big the cat, shadow the hedgehog, cream the rabbit, silver the hedgehog and a whole LOT more, sonic games became SWAMPED with characters who were only loosely associated with sonic and that fans knew nothing about.

So here we are now: SEGA has no idea what to do with sonic as a character, the sonic team have came up with a whole host of unusable characters they cant un-write and have bastardized the sonic storyline to the point of uselessness. So what can they do? well stop ripping off mario games for starters but then what?

I'm not an expert but i have a few ideas:
1. go back to 2d for starters then build from there. Everyone loved sonic up until he dipped his feet in 3d, so stick with what will make the fans happy. Sonic 4 was a step in the right direction and could be the start of something big, but could just as easily go bad again, as there is no story to back it up and he still retains some of his 3d moves list.

2. erase all the 2000-2010 storylines (no big tragedy as they don't even continue from one another and ignore sonic's backstory anyway) and have separate teams working on sonic games in the east and west to give the individual sotrylines room to grow or at the very LEAST have proper localization that use earth and mobius and eggman and robotnik separately.

3. Get rid of the extraneous characters. While this may get rid of the occasional gem, sonic was easiest to understand when it was just sonic, tails, knuckles, amy and robotnik. Rouge and cream may well be missed, but they could be written back in TASTEFULLY with proper storylines at a later date, but SEGA should be VERY picky and remember to:

4. NEVER let sonic characters speak again. Any attempt at making sonic and chums vocalize has been like nails on a blackboard. Sonic (according to certain sources) is meant to be 16 years old but talks like a twelve year old mixed with a surfer. Whilst that was bad enough, Tails (12 years old) has only been voiced by women who make him sound much younger, and the less said about Cream's or Amy's voice actors the better.

Some people have said sonic has run his course, if he continues to be in games like sonic unleashed where he transforms into a werehog (werewolf...thing) i'd gladly never see him again. But i just know that sonic is better than that. The original sonic 2d games were something new and exciting, but also had wonderful mechanics, varied, memorable levels and soundtracks and speed, lots of speed. They are still utterly classic games that are seeing releases on iphone and xbox live simply because people still find them enjoyable to play. If SEGA sits down and actually takes its time to treat the guy that made them a household name with the consideration they owe him, we could be looking at the revival of the century and then it would be sonic vs mario the way nature intended.

For those still in doubt that sonic was awesome and deserves a second chance, take a look at this picture:

Remember super sonic? The story goes that the chaos emeralds, when collected, infused sonic with such tremendous power and rage, he transformed into a psychotic version of himself, unstable yet unparalleled in terms of speed and brute force. Tell me you wouldn't like to see that explained in a story arc, where sonic fights to remain sane under the opressive force of the emeralds. Theres a lot of interesting stories to be explored in the sonic universe, once you look past the squaeky voices and big-eyed kiddy character bullshit. Sonic was serious and can be again.