I dunno man
I just miss the days where the announcement of a new Sonic game was cause for pure excitement rather than excitement mixed with anxious dread. Ironically, Sonic 06 is the last time I felt that way (pre-mania but that was a different dev team for a different type of Sonic game), mainly because I didn’t know what I was in for. I miss the tone of that era of Sonic’s history. A lot of that aspect of things can be traced to art direction and sound design but it’s also the storytelling (I’ve gone on about the game design so I’ll skip that here). Like, what happened to the focus on character interaction? What happened to even passable writing? I’m not asking for anything mind blowing, give me a story where Sonic is genuinely cool again. Where Eggman seems like a threat to all but Sonic & Co because he’s so confident and snarky with him. Where’s the actual banter? Not puns, not jokes, BANTER. To understand what I mean, watch DBZ Abridged. The jokes very frequently come down to banter, how characters play off each other’s personalities. Very rarely are there stock jokes, with set ups and punchlines not derived from who’s interacting. The pizza bit between Goku and Frieza isn’t a non sequitur. It’s not a joke about pizza, it’s funny because Frieza, the genocidal tyrant. is backed into a corner and, in order to get out, bribes Goku with a pizza and it works. It’s funny because, from what we know about Goku, it makes sense that he’d take the bait. That, in a life or death struggle over the fate of the galaxy, one that’s cost his best friend’s life and has so many other stakes, Goku was willing to let Frieza power up because Frieza, who is, again. a genocidal tyrant who has nothing to gain by following through, promised him 2 pizzas with stuffed crust. Nobody set up a punchline, the entire scene IS the punchline. It’s all in who these characters are and how their performances are delivered. How they interact, the back and forth between them.
Give the writing of the games to people who understand and care about the series and characters. Give it to people who CAN write tense or funny banter. Who know who these characters are and can make them play off each other
