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| BlizShadow | Jun 24 2008, 06:56 PM |
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I think I've said this possibly sacrilegious statement enough times to get the point across: I dislike the Sonic fandom as a whole. We're a grumpy bunch of unsatisfied and whiny bastards who are more content in forcing the past down others' throats instead of looking at the possibilities of the future. We'll immediately shoot down new ideas, we'll disown anything not perfectly classic, we're elitist, we're bitchy, we're babyish (Here's to you, Simon Jeffrey), yada yada yada, I think you get the highly stereotypical picture right now. But while I hate this attitude, I admit there's some justification in it with Sonic Team's track record since 2003. Gameplay and universe problems abound, Sega's unintentionally divided the fanbase because they've proven that Sonic is ridiculously capable of succeeding at anything, and it pains us when he doesn't reach that mark. It's made a lot of us unable to step outside of our comfort zone when the hedgehog treads new water, leading to shaky impressions of new material. I think you can partially see where I'm going with this. New ideas come about, and they're shot down, but I'm not going to focus on the wild gunfire in general so much as a painfully annoying justification for it: "It isn't like that for something else, so why is it like that for this?" You've seen this reason in many forms before: "Mario doesn't have voice acting, so why does Sonic have to have voice acting?" "The classic games had colorful backgrounds, so why doesn't this new game have colorful backgrounds?" "Sonic never needed vehicular assistance before, so why does he ride a board?" It's basically a spin-off of the age-old adage "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." But the horrible problem with this saying is that it assumes that the "it" was already perfect in the realm of the six-plus billion minds living today and automatically will be for future minds, which is obviously impossible. Nothing is without the possibility of genuine improvement or out of the realm of being able to be interpreted differently. It's this type of counter-productive thinking makes me wonder why must Sonic games always be compared to other things and subsequently looked down upon? It seems we're totally unable to judge things on intention; what something is trying to be versus what it was never meant to be. It's very easy to shoot Sonic Adventure 2, Shadow, or Sonic '06 down just on the basis for not incorporating fantastical settings, but ignoring the fact that even the classics weren't all Carnival Nights and Emerald Hills and that there's other factors to these thematic compositions than "realism" or "fantasy", did one ever wonder if that's what the artists were intentionally trying to do in the first place? Of course, the easiest dismissal of my aggravation is that all of this really just boils down to the mere opinion of some people. But I think we've taken this concept into the realm of straight bashing and an overwhelming amount of conservatism that doesn't allow for the enjoyment or even trial of new ideas and themes in the Sonic universe. |
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Yes, I carry my sig everywhere. XD ~*~ Cheap Entertainment: March of the Penguins; in 5 seconds: Don't want to watch the entire documentary to see what the fuss is about? Here's a pretty accurate summary.... ~*Quote Of The Moment*~ "Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the present." -- Master Oogway | |
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| It Doesn't Have To Be This Way! · Sonic Discussion | |
2:32 AM Nov 30
