How much of the hatred for Sonic's friends that was pretty common in the early 2010s and late 2000s do you agree with?
I dunno. I will say this: I've been fine with most Sonic games focusing on just having Sonic as the only playable character. Sonic has become such a different type of gameplay that it's hard to make environments that support multiple characters.
This was proven to me playing Sonic Robo-Blast 2. There's a character mod that adds "Modern Sonic," with all the abilities he had from Sonic Rush up through Sonic Generations. And though SRB2 is really good at designing levels to have routes for Knuckles, or Tails, or whatever, if you load up Modern Sonic you can break the entire game over your knee. Go anywhere and do anything -- almost no route is off limits.
The only reason it works in Sonic Frontiers is because in a post Generations world, they've hit Sonic with the nerf stick hard.
But I will say that by Sonic Heroes I was pretty shocked. The common complaint in Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 is that there were too many playable characters and it was detracting from the time you spent playing as Sonic. Sonic was the best parts of those games and often only made up a fraction of play time.
I defended Sonic Adventure around my school, and Sonic Adventure 2 moved to streamline a lot of things, but then we get to Sonic Heroes and there's... 12 playable characters. It was one of those moments that felt incredibly tone deaf. On top of that, I thought the newcomers, Team Chaotix, looked pretty bad.
Vector especially. His proportions are a nightmare. To this day, I want the original tall, lanky Vector back.
After that, I could only just kind of shrug. "Yeah, sorry, Sonic games have too many characters, and they're ugly, and there's all this nagging, annoying dialog. I don't really get it either."
I think they are striking a better balance of how to handle larger casts but I'd rather keep Sonic front and center under the spotlight. If they announce Sonic Frontiers 2 with four (or more?) playable characters, that's going to worry me.
I do and will always believe that's a problem. People did complain about too many characters crowding Sonic out of a Sonic game, and on top of that, it stretches development resources thin. Every time you add a new character with some wildly different gameplay style, you are effectively budgeting for a whole separate game within your existing game.
And when you have four, five, six or more playable characters, you are stretching things very, very, very thin in terms of resources. I'd rather have a good solo Sonic game than a mediocre-to-bad game where you can also play as Tails, Knuckles, Amy, etc.
