Section I: The Quick Introduction
Dear readers,
Sonic XS, the decades long Sonic
project that I, AmzroSevca, have been working on extensively, is officially
ending as of today which is June 15th, 2023. Why the project is finally
ending and what lead me to this crucial decision will be fully explained in
this final project letter. The primary reason for why Sonic XS is being
ended is that the project ultimately became far too derivative.
It
draws upon the elements of the Sonic franchise, but instead of being a
reconstruction of the franchise like it was supposed to be, it rapidly
evolved into a wild piece of fan fiction that has more fan material in it
than it does official material. The stories, zones, gameplay ideas, etc,
drew on what was provided, and then turned into something so different that
the project is unrecognizable as a reconstruction or redesign of the
franchise. Instead it lends itself to being a work of historical fiction
that contains ridiculously ambitious content that veers too far away from
the source material and real world history.
Section II: Getting Back Into Things
Initially I had completed the bulk of the work on Sonic XS by
the end of 2020. There were plans to also reconstruct the other eras of the
franchise aside from just the classic era, but the classic era was done up
as a nice present with a bow on top and everything. Three years passed and
very little happened with the project. An update released which added some
quality of life changes and necessary edits to improve the viewer’s
enjoyment, but it didn’t do much more than just that. Now, fast forward to
the summer of 2023 and I begin to dig into something else that I have had
critical interest in for a long time. Gaming journalism.
Gaming
journalism, just like journalism in general, is a can of worms and after
years going by and nothing seeming to improve in the sphere of reviews, I
decided to launch a project that saw me doing several months of extensive
research into why gaming journalism has ended up the way it has. Long story
short, I learned that good journalism takes a lot of resources and has very
little reward whereas bad journalism takes few resources and can sometimes
score bigger rewards. And if the bad journalism ends up with no reward? No
sweat, because no great amount of time, resources, or money were invested in
the first place.
This is when I decided to go and try my hand at
writing a comprehensive review of Sonic the Hedgehog CD as a test run. After
hours of researching opinion pieces, developer interviews, refreshing myself
on my own playthroughs of the game’s many releases (SEGA CD 1993 Original,
Sonic Gems Collection, 2011 Remaster, Sonic Origins), and bringing up
countless papers on the flavors of game design, I finally put keyboard to
screen as I began to type up my analytical review.
Section III: The Problem Arises
However this is when the desire to write more about how Sonic
CD’s flaws could be fixed rather than just reviewing the game’s elements in
comprehensive detail struck me. I started to think about how Sonic CD could
be reconstructed into a more fulfilling experience and thought back to Sonic
XS. It dawned on me that such an idea with Sonic games in general was the
original idea of the Sonic XS project and I started to consider how the
project could be moved forward. Thoughts about gameplay mechanics, story
beats, quality of life features, and more raced through my mind. This is
when I began considering redoing the entirety of Sonic XS in order to bring
the project more closely in line with being a franchise reconstruction
effort. I would seek to work solely with existing materials in their most
vanilla formats to try and fit them together better to the best of my
abilities without turning things upside down.
Before I could ever
start though, I stopped. After calculating the time for R&D (research
and development) along with the long-term commitment, it became clear to me
that the entire project would simply not be worth it. It is obvious from the
past twenty years alone that SEGA has cared more about money than
creativity, because they are a business first and a developer of video games
second. Even Sonic Frontiers, which was highly praised by much of the gaming
press and most Sonic fans, was not much more than a band-aid on a mangled
body when it comes to the franchise as a whole. The Sonic franchise needs a
surgical reconstruction in order to fix its disfigured form. The new lore
team that SEGA has been hiring is going to encounter a mind-numbing mess due
to the neglect on SEGA’s part and how they have left Sonic Team and other
studios throwing Sonic all over the place, trying to find some level of
consistency if any at all.
Section IV: Gotta Go Fast?
There simply is no clear focus or identity for the blue blur.
Sometimes he’s turning into a werewolf (ahem sorry I mean “werehog”),
watching his rival ride motorcycles with machine guns, running through
fantasy novels with swords, absorbing aliens, wrapping himself into more
sports tape than necessary, kissing humans in a bad romance plot, suffering
through a stagnant turn based RPG with extremely poor sound quality bound to
cause hearing loss, or attempting to re-create Super Mario Galaxy with a
burning desire for hardcore parkour. Sonic Team has been throwing anything
and everything at the wall to see what sticks. And sometimes when something
sticks, they just take it off the wall. Sonic Frontiers is the first sign of
that trend breaking, but even then, promises are empty until they are
fulfilled.
All of this is made even worse when you consider that
even the official social media presences for the Sonic franchise have joked
about the questionable nature of Sonic’s canon and general franchise
consistency on various occasions. Some games have even been completely
dropped from canon while others have gone unconfirmed or simply brushed
under the rug. Many still are left scratching their heads about the
consequences of the Sonic 4 duology (which are mobile games given elevated
status by title), Sonic Free Riders, Shadow the Hedgehog (which didn’t need
to happen), Sonic Heroes (Sega Sonic Arcade and Chaotix are now irrelevant I
guess) Sonic Team Racing (which was abandoned on release), Sonic Forces,
Sonic Generations (solely in the writing department), and other titles in
the franchise’s history.
Bad writing, bad marketing choices, and
poor long-term planning has lead to plenty of obligatory mental gymnastics
and hand waving. And it doesn’t help that even in the case of the most
recent release, Sonic Frontiers, the world building was completely screwed
up due to the game’s botched development that saw what used to be three
islands get split into five. And to add salt to the wound, the game still
has story leftovers in the final release that blatantly contradict what the
player is experiencing in the game. Combine this with the troubled
development also leading to issues regarding insane pop-in, reduced
graphical fidelity, completely removed story beats, seemingly random
implementation of platforming obstacles, etc, and it’s not hard to see just
how rough Sonic is still having it all these years later.
Section V: Gotta Go to the Past!
But before anyone claims that this is just a grilling of the
franchise’s modern era, many of these problems have plagued Sonic since the
very beginning. The classic era, which contains some of the most praised
games in the entire franchise, is riddled with cut content, unrealized
visions, conflicting backstories, and other problems of a complicated
nature. Extensive research has shown that there never were supposed to be
three different islands, a different numbers of chaos emeralds in each game,
inconsistent lore concerning the emeralds, or copy pasted level themes.
There
is a reason why Emerald Hill, Turquoise Hill, Great Turquoise, and a couple
of other zones look nearly identical to the Green Hill Zone. There is a
reason why both Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 & Knuckles feature Hidden Palace
zones (yet the former had its version scrapped in its original release).
There is a reason why Ice Cap and Sandopolis, which are snow and desert
zones, make an appearance in Sonic 3 & Knuckles, yet those biomes are
absent from the other Genesis titles (excluding Sonic 3D Blast) and in
particular, Sonic 2. There is a reason why South Island, West Side Island,
and Angel Island all have eerily similar backstories (to where they are
basically the exact same one) that leave no room for it just being a
coincidence.
Then you have to account for situations such as the
parallel development of Sonic CD and Sonic 2 which were made by two
different regions of SEGA and ended up being very different games or
Knuckles’ Chaotix (also known just as “Chaotix”) which was developed by a
studio that had very little contact if any with the original team behind
Sonic. Even the stories written in the manuals changed from region to
region. You also had some games based on external media such as TV shows and
comics such as Sonic Spinball that led to dead ends or were stuck in
isolation such as Mean Bean Machine. Let’s not forget how one game started
out as a Mickey Mouse game (yes, literally) and due to product development
high jinks was turned into a Sonic game...that played nothing like Sonic
(and yeah it’s considered a spin-off but still has debated lore
implications).
Section VI: Blaming Fans? Blame SEGA.
But what has caused the most problems are the frequent
renovations of Sonic’s identity in addition to an unending list of
retractions, retcons, reboots, and rebrands. There was Sonic Adventure,
Sonic 06, Sonic Boom, Sonic Forces, Sonic Origins (no the super emeralds are
not canon anymore), and now Sonic Frontiers to name a few. And don’t even
get me started on Tails Tube or whatever nonsensical YouTube podcast Sonic
Team has going on at the moment. When one of your core selling points (cue
year of Sonic 2020) is how many followers your social media accounts have,
you know you are in down bad territory.
Considering the fact
that, collectively speaking, most Sonic fans and gaming enthusiasts did not
grow up with the same character nor the same type of game (or games), it is
no wonder that the fan-base is fragmented into four or five different eras
which have their own sub-divisions. Some people grew up on Sonic CD, while
others grew up on Sonic Rush Adventure, while some others grew up on Sonic
Lost World which are all wildly different games. Could you imagine if Mario,
Bomberman, Donkey Kong, or Mega Man were handled like this? Thankfully those
series have a consistent design philosophy in their mainline titles and
their spin-offs have well established identities that pick lanes and stick
to them rather than swerving all over the place like Drift Kings.
Despite
Sonic fans always blaming other Sonic fans day in and day out, the fans are
not at fault for the current state that Sonic is in. It is SEGA and always
has been SEGA. They are the ones who gave Sonic Team the green light (or
even forced them in some cases) to go helter-skelter with every other entry,
leading to several different generations of people growing up with different
games that all portrayed Sonic in drastically different ways. And then the
department would be indecisive about what worked and what didn’t which would
lead to the cycle looping in on itself. This is one of the biggest reasons
why reconstructing the franchise, especially as just a fan project, is a
waste of time.
Not even considering legal problems, lack of
funding, and time considerations, Sonic XS is a project that would end up
dead in the water because the Sonic franchise is weighed down with far too
many contradictions, unplanned creations, misaligned elements, and botched
visions to be salvageable without a massive commitment of time and
resources. Both of which could be better spent securing my own future rather
than daydreaming about “what-ifs” for a blue rat that has been shackled and
beaten to death.
Not to mention that there are plenty of fan
games made every single year that fill the gaps that SEGA leaves empty.
However, remaking even just a single game, and doing it thoroughly well,
would take years of research, development, planning, testing, etc, that
would lead to a questionable portfolio piece (because of legal problems) and
free work done for a company that should be doing it themselves. The
thoughts surrounding Sonic XS right before the decision to bring it to a
close went something like this: If I am going to extensively research and
develop fixes for a game over the course of several years, then chances are
I will just be remaking the game or getting into heavy modding. And in that
case, what is the point of me doing something that the owners of the IP
should be doing themselves since it is costing me time and money that I
simply don’t have to spare.
Section VII: So This Is the End
After those thoughts registered, I realized that Sonic XS was
little more than an intense daydreaming exercise that took up a decade of my
life and got the world no closer to an official resolution about the state
of the Sonic series. Sure, I maybe refined some skills along the way such as
programming, game design, research writing, basic spriting, and so on but
that’s about it. Plus most of those developed skills came from other
projects I have done anyways. I also came to the hard, yet truthful
conclusion that no one really cares that much about the franchise except the
most deeply invested die-hard fans which make up an extremely small
minority. And some of these die-hard fans are so highly combative and
over-committed to just one specific version of the many different versions
of Sonic (which again SEGA is to blame for), that talking to them is like
talking to a brick wall, let alone developing a project with them that
requires long-term commitment.
With the Sonic franchise being
such a train wreck it is difficult to convince people to get into it and
become invested for the long haul when the long haul thus far has been an 80
car pileup. And don’t even get me started on how SEGA squandered their
chances to properly reset the franchise with the releases of Sonic Origins
and Sonic Frontiers. The former was a horrendous cash grab with shitty
micro-transaction DLC schemes and the latter is still dressing up in the
backroom as DLC waves continue to roll out over the months, adding
desperately needed content to fill empty voids and fix glaring flaws. I mean
this isn’t really a surprise since this is all coming from the same company
that has put the franchise through two sizable dark ages. So, with all that
being said, Sonic XS is going gold (as the game industry likes to say) as it
steps from being an active project into being an archived one from this day
onward. In just two decades, I have gone from a die-hard Sonic gaming fan to
a disenchanted skeptic that has been burned more times than there are stars
in the universe (as have many others).
And before you say
“ackshually ur not a weel sawnic fan!” for laying out these hard truths,
I’ll have you know that I bought the highest tiered deluxe versions of both
Sonic Frontiers and Sonic Origins (being $70 and $55 respectively), sinking
hundreds of hours into both games in addition to the rest of the franchise’s
game catalog ranging from Sonic Labyrinth to Sonic Lost World along with
everything in-between or around. So shut up. I have been playing Sonic since
I was just 3 years old and now I am headed towards my 22nd birthday. Of
course at this point I’m no longer a fan of Sonic (emphasis being on the “no
longer” part there) as a franchise in its entirety but I will forever
remember the fine glimpses of truly exciting potential that I saw in the
franchise throughout its history. With that being said, I’m done with Sonic
XS and I’m done holding out hope for Sonic, because quite frankly, the
damage and discord already runs too deep.
Sincerely,
AmzroSevca