#sonic cycle

[kungfu-grip]

Super Smash Dril: Sonic the Hedgehog

bad news: were all helpless cogs doomed to ceaselessly perpetuate a machine good news: the machine is a Sega and were all sonic the hegehog

[blazehedgehog]

Is any aspect of The Sonic Cycle accurate nowadays? Has Sonic really been stuck in a cycle of largely subpar games since the 2000s? Is there any way we can come to an era where a good Sonic game can happen without fans arguing over if the game was crap or not?

I'd stop focusing on "fans arguing over if the game as crap or not." That will always happen. It even happens in, like, the Legend of Zelda community.

To me, and to a lot of people, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are like, some of the greatest games of our time. They are pillars of fun game design, that embrace creative problem solving like no other game has ever done before.

But there are hardcore Zelda fans that genuinely do not like them. Hate them, even. Because these newest games forsake too much of the traditional Zelda structure of dungeons and dungeon items instead of the shorter shrines and more natural caves and mazes.

So even within the Legend of Zelda franchise, literally one of the most critically acclaimed game series ever created, containing multiple entries people have called "the greatest game of all time", even there, you have fans arguing over which games are better than others. It will always happen. It is fandom nature to split even the tiniest hairs.

And no. The Sonic Cycle has never been right. Even when that image was made, the Sonic Cycle as it described did not exist.

[alicemoon812]

time for war

[daakkast-blog]

Sonic Forces - Original The Character. A reflection on a childhood hero

It’s nae secret man. 

Ah luff Sonic the Hedgehog. 

Everyone has that one thing that they cling onto from their childhood and Sonic is ma man. I got a Sega Mega Drive (aye, mega drive sounds cooler than ‘genesis’) when i was a wee guy - passed on from my uncle, which was passed onto him from my Dad. As soon as I was old enough to actually control my motor functions I was torn right intae this Blue bastard. 

He was the epitome of cool. His mad shoes n that. Mad cartoons that were as mental as the Looney Tunes. Although my dad would like to believe a certain football team influenced my favourite colour - it was defo the blue blur. Yer childhood hero that’s a hedgehog. 

As time went on, I continued to play Sonic on repeat until he made that leap intae 3D. Which was.....mixed. At the time, I thought Sonic Adventure was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen in my life. I remember getting it for Christmas that year and even though I was cursed with a bedbound illness, (every Christmas day for like 7 years) I still manned up - let my baws drop and play through the campaign. 

It was everything I’d imagined! Unlocking multiple characters, stories with cutscenes, different levels for each character. 

The only offputting attributes were the weird directions to have the gang in the real world and Big the Cats fishing game??

Despit all this - I was that guy that would try and stand like Sonic when noone was watching. Ye kno the one where after he lands a jump he stands all ready to go?

Aye, like that! Similarly, I’d be the guy running with his arms behind his back - gotta go fast!

As a side note to this, when I had my packed lunch at school I used to have a wee sandwhich bag filled with biscuits. Know what id do wae them? Put them behind ma back and swing them real fast like a propeller. 

Tails troops. 

Let’s speed things up a bit and blast right through SA2 and Sonic Heroes. Again, at the time those games were great - more of the same. Coming to the close of that generation, the mind wanders to what Sonic would become for next gen? 

Little did I know the next gen Sonic game would kill nearly everything I loved about the series. By this point I was old enough to realise that mixing Sonic with real world is not what I wanted - so they made him have a romatic relationship with a human and released a broken mess of a game. 

I’m no dwellin on the reasons behind Sonic 06s failure - but the main takeaway is that the game killed any chance of playable side characters for over 11 years in a mainline game. 

11 FUCKIN YEARS

So, when Sonic Forces has a mysterious 3rd playable character, my baws literally canae get anymore blue (hehe, Sonic). I wasn’t even thinking at first that it might have been the return of Tails or Knuckles - I was in the crowd thinking it would be Boom or Adventure Sonic. Once the mysterious shadow was revealed and those dreams were squashed - the only thought left on my mind was Tails or Knuckles. I had seen suggestions of a create-a-character but that seemed obsurd. 

Sega had previously said that they did not want to introduce any new characters to the mainline games. They agreed that the number of characters had gotten too high - hence the reduciton in playable characters to just Sonic?

Anyways I even hoped this game would maybe be in line with the SatAM cartoon - with the freedom fighters and maybe that the shadowy figure was Antoine?

BIT NAW

It actually was revealed to be create a character. HOPES FUCKIN CRUSHED

I know this is good for a lot of people and I get that - but to me this is just another sign of Sega not having a clue what to do with their franchise. The evidence stacks up, from the rehash of the generations formula to the uninspired level designs and piss poor physics with boots pads everywhere...

I mean I even seen Echidna gloves and Tails shoes in the trailer??

(Aye awrite they’re no quite the same but ye get the idea)

I just don’t see why it would have been so hard for Sega to just put these characters in that are already loved and in desperate need of a comeback. 

Take a look at Sonic Mania and see why it’s doing so well. This post is getting too long and I hope to make more in the future.

DISCLAIMER ah probs will still buy the game - but this is just pissing me off

xox

[thegameisalife]

El Ciclo de Sonic... volverá a atacar.

The Sonic Cycle... will strike back.

Original strip on Dorkly

[larpediem]

Unpopular opinion/real talk: I'm down for the new Sonic design for Sonic Boom, but maybe that's the Sonic Cycle talking, and not me.

[blazehedgehog]

From your GOTY video: When you mentioned you don't like the "Sonic Cycle," do you mean you hate that the games follow it or think it's a false model?

A little of both.

I feel like The Sonic Cycle was a response to Sonic 2006. The PR cycle for that game was clearly at odds with what was actually being developed. I feel like Sonic Team was just doing their own thing and the people trying to sell the game at trade shows knew consumers were going to hate it, so they were trying to talk around certain features.

Which, in the end, means Sega PR basically lied about that game all the way up until the last minute where they had to confirm that yes, you could play as Sonic’s “amigos” and this and that and the other thing.

But maybe we should recap what exactly the Sonic Cycle is. Basically:

1. First Info on New Sonic Game

A lack of Sonic’s friends

Hopes get raised

Fans champion that this is Sonic’s triumphant return

2. Further Information Revealed

Sonic’s old friends show up

Sonic gets new friends

Gameplay is the same old junk

Hopes plummet

3. Game Released

Reviews slam the game

Massive disappointment

Fans proclaim they will never be fooled again.

4. The process starts all over again with the next game

You can actually see Sonic 2006 in this pretty directly. It certainly represents my arc with the game's marketing cycle. Initial footage for that game was all about just Sonic, but then they revealed Shadow and Silver, and then they revealed Tails, Knuckles, Amy, etc. Around the time they started revealing Sonic’s “amigos”, Sega America PR also left us with an absolute gem of a line.

Sonic had been “going back to his roots” for a long time. It came to be that after Sonic Adventure 1, Sonic Adventure 2 was “going back to his roots” by eliminating Adventure Fields and streamlining the game. Sonic Heroes was “going back to his roots” with the game’s more classic-focused aesthetic of checkerboard hills. They thankfully skipped the rhetoric for Shadow the Hedgehog, but when it came time for Sonic 2006, an interview came along that was something like

SEGA PR: With this game, Sonic’s going back to his roots.

INTERVIEWER: What do you mean?

SEGA PR: His roots in the original Sonic Adventure.

And at least for me it was this moment of WHAT. ARE YOU EVEN. SAYING!!! The exact game that created the notion of Sonic needing to “go back to his roots” is now the target of such a claim? You people.

However, since then, the original Sonic Cycle hasn’t really actually applied to any Sonic games. If you follow the exact word-for-word definition of it, it does not apply to Sonic Unleashed, which was functionally a massively different game versus what came before it. Nor does it apply to Sonic Colors, or Sonic Generations, really.

The last game the formal Sonic Cycle applied to would be Sonic & The Black Knight, a game that is five years old as of this year.

What happened is that the Sonic Cycle came to represent something, which is why I dared invoke it when talking about Sonic Lost World. Essentially, it now means:

This Sonic game looks like it might be pretty good.

Uhhh, maybe not?

Wow, no, it really wasn’t, why hasn’t anyone learned their lesson yet?

Of course, thinking back to the “golden era” of this meme, this broader definition still doesn’t really apply, because the “mainstream” thinks that Colors was better than Unleashed, and Generations was better than Colors (as far as I’ve seen). Quality was going up, not down. So the moment the Sonic Cycle meme was created also happens to be the moment it stopped being applicable, at least to the mainline games.

And yet, it permeated. It kept coming up. It became a tool used by people who weren’t funny enough to come up with their own snark and needed somebody else’s dead horse to beat. And that’s dumb. If you’re reading this and you used the Sonic Cycle in the last, say, 4 years, you’re a bad person who makes bad jokes. And not like, the kind of “funny-bad” jokes that people groan at, but the “boo, get off the stage” kind of jokes. The stuff people throw tomatoes at you for.

Please get better jokes.

[chaosdx1]

Old Songs and the Sonic Cycle.

Just listening to some more game songs.

Ya know, back when I first heard the main theme for Sonic Colors, Reach for the Stars, I thought it might be talking about the infamous Sonic Cycle. Especially this part:

"Just take a chance. We'll do it right again. Just gonna reach for the stars..."

I thought this could be - though probably isn't - Sega asking you to give the Sonic games one more try. "Take a chance and buy Sonic Colors," it seemed to say "We'll get it right again, just like the games you used to love. We'll reach for perfection."

Of course we all know what happened with Sonic Colors: The game turned out to be amazing. The cycle was shattered. Sega did good.