it was never good.
There's a distaste the broader culture develops around a property when they get the feeling that it has a fan-base bigger than what the quality of the thing warrant (see: twilight). If there's a franchise that has a massive, incredibly rabid fan-base but the entries in that franchise are all mediocre at best the go-to line is "that franchise should just get back to when it was good". And I'm here to spoil for you why Sonic doesn't get back to when it was good.
The problem is it was never good.
People aren't fans of Sonic bc the games were good. Most people who are fans of Sonic never played a Sonic game they liked, or even played one at all. They're fans bc of its marketing.
A 15 year old in 2009 wasn't posting OC bc the old games were good -- they'd never played the old games; they had never even seen an NES. They were posting OC bc before they had a PC with MS paint, their parents bought them coloring books & they spent their free time before they had a PC making Sonic OC on Sonic coloring books.
The games were never good to begin with tho. All of the best Sonic games of all time had exactly 1 good level each. Sega spent an obscene amount of time & energy marketing the franchise -- they even went so far as to collaborate with Michael Jackson in several ways (the character is partially based on him), but in terms of actually making the games they only put in the time & effort of making 1 good level for each game, made it the first level which everyone would play the most bc the game would kick you back to the main menu when you ran out of lives and then just shipped it.
TLDR; the games were never good, Sonic only had its fandom bc of the coloring books, there is no golden age of "Good Sonic Games" to go back to & if you've spent your whole life thinking or mis-remembering that there was you have been fooled by a marketing ploy.
this particular complaint is really common but is actually kind of incorrect. It would be bad design for a game meant to be beaten in a single run, but sonic was never meant to be beaten in a single run. If you play a remake of Sonic with saves where losing sends you back to the start of the level you lost on you are actually being wronged by the version you're playing & not the game's design itself; the reason they designed a game about speed to have obstacles that come at you from off-screen too fast for you to react to is bc ur meant to play them slowly to start with, get as far into the game as you can, lose & get sent back to the first level and then replay the whole game a little faster than last time. In games meant to be beaten on the first try, the power fantasy of the game (like Batman being able to beat up thugs without a scratch in Arkhum Asylum) is a given. In games where you're meant to lose (like Dark Souls) the power fantasy is earned by the player by mastering it. Mario is the former, Sonic is the latter. People forget this but Sonic was originally a roguelike
No, it most definitely was not ever a roguelike.
u were meant to have all ur progress hard-reset every time u lost & kicked back to the start to re-play the parts of the game u beat before, getting better & better at the earlier levels of the game until you get good enough at a later part to make it further. Kind of a roguelike. I'd say it's not a dungeoncrawler roguelike, but it also kind of is that too
Okay, I see. I consider procedural generation of levels to be a defining feature of roguelikes, which Sonic certainly didn't have. But for the aspects you mention, yes, it fits the bill.
expanding brain meme: nethack is a roguelike -> binding of isaac is a roguelike -> dead cells is a roguelike -> sonic the hedgehog is a roguelike
why do i keep losing on world 5 of SMB2 then, smh
You're supposed to give the controller to your older brother for that one.
This is true, and it highlights the core problems with the 3d games. Speed in the original games wasn't a constant, it was a reward for skilled play. You went fast only when you knew what you were doing.
The 3d games treat speed as a core feature at all levels of play, and that's why most of them were pretty bad until they finally figured out how to sort of make that work in Generations.
yeah it turns out that what specifically doesnt work about Sonic in 3d is that a facing-forward perspective lets you see the obstacles ahead of time. It sounds like its what the series always needed, it lets the player go faster, but it removes the core challenge of the original games by just letting the player see the obstacles way ahead of time
Yep, and that's why the 3d levels in Generations are just roller coaster rides