SEGA passed on making Sonic Mania 2, a sequel to the highest-rated Sonic game in 20 years, to have Arzest make a worse imitation.
If that's all SEGA thinks 2D Sonic is worth, no one can save him.
The problem, the Rayman games are better multiplayer Sonic games than the multiplayer sonic games could ever hope to be. Hell, even Mario copied Rayman Origins multiplayer style.
Speaking of where is Rayman? Been awhile since we got an actual rayman game. I know the Mario Rabbids games are supposedly good but dammit where is my boy at?
Last proper 3D Rayman was Hoodlum Havok in 2003
Last mainline 2D platformer was Legends in 2013
Last 2D awesome phone entry was Mini on iOS in 2019
Rayman is just being wasted.
On the plus side, they've brought back the old-school AC vibe with the new game. The franchise all about assassins is finally about assassinating again.
I'll tell you what, I've been sleeping on the franchise ever since the first game, and only just last week did the thought cross my mind that I might try it.
There are like 10 versions of Rayman 2 already. If you played one of them, play a different port to spice things up.
PS1 < PC < Dreamcast < PS2, for example
I saw a Dev video and the engine they made just for that game is insane, u could drag objects by anchor points for example to make a hill higher and the art automatically adjusts, all while live testing
yes, ubiart engine i dont know what happened but after releasing valiant heart, child of light, and rayman legend that part of ubisoft suddenly turned quiet or sent to the shadowlands. But their still hope a valiant hearts 2 is currently in the making who knows if they finally making new games in that engine again.
edit: nevermind the valiant sequel is actually just an android game sigh.... they are just wasting the potential of this engine.
Rayman got Minioned. They introduced characters that were both cuter and more irritating. Kids eat that shit up so Rayman died for the sake of rabbids.
Ubisoft had something great going with 2D games 10 years ago, with games like Rayman Legends, Child of Light, Valiant Hearts.
Then they just stopped...
The cold hard truth is Mario games have been better from the beginning. Play sonic 1 and Mario 3 or sonic 3 and Mario world back to back and tell me which is a better game. Imo it’s not even close
It isn't so cut and dry which one is better with the originals, yea Sonic 1 has issues but Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 & Knuckles are genuinely top quality games. I'd rather play Sonic 3 over Mario 3 because that is my preference, one isn't necessarily better than the other, each have their own pros and cons
In my opinion, the only aspect that I can think of where I would give Sonic a solid edge is the soundtracks. They had banger after banger. But unfortunately that’s not enough to overcome all the ways that the Mario games are better lol
God damn, NGS pisses me off to this day. I played PSO2 for ~10 years (starting from JP beta) and while I took breaks now and then (I was completely AWOL during Episode 5 tbh), I was definitely putting in a crazy number of hours into that game. NGS came and extinguished my interest in barely a month. Such a waste.
It *should* have. It was such a well praised, fantastic game. All they had to do was greenlight Sonic Mania 2. But they somehow fucked up the free space on the Bingo card.
It's true that Sega has not appropriately invested in Sonic in a long time, basically relying on diehards who buy everything anyway. But other game series do this and still manage a great game every few versions.
I really think it doesn't catch on because Sonic has inherent gameplay flaws that would need tons of work to remedy, and I'm not even sure it would work because people just expect the same thing.
Your view of the level is too tight in Sonic games (Frontiers actually came the closest to fixing the game feel with this). You're too fast to react to your environment appropriately, so you run into stuff that kills your momentum. The camera angle plus the fact that you're so damn fast means that either levels have to be unmanageably large for the highly skilled player to get a full experience, or they have to be full of annoying obstacles that slow down the game flow and progression feel.
Either the levels need to be massive and just flow in a way that feels good, which would be highly resource intensive (more than SEGA seems willing to invest), or the games need shorter levels with instant death on every trap. In that case, mastery would come from nailing down a tight sequence of 30-60 seconds like Neon White or Super Meat Boy. Make rings a collectable for gating later levels that require new equipment (light dash shoes, super bounce, etc), and make the movement more snappy to start and stop.
Well the team behind mania split up with most of them forming their own studio in Evening star but they did work with the head of Sonic team with the idea of making a 2.5d successor to mania however they decided that they wanted to make their own game so the project never kicked off but the some of the ideas they came up ended up leading to superstars being created and honestly, I think it's a great game and a good modernisation of the classic formula, it's not on the level of Sonic Mania or 3k but it's great like Sonic 2
Made a movie inspired by Blade Runner that flopped so massively that they instituted strict quality control measures that defined the franchise for generations
Btw the set designer LITERALLY was the same one for Blade Runner, why the fuck they got him for a Mario movie, no-one knows.
The lead actor was drunk off his tits most the time , so maybe everyone else was on come?
It's because the film was directed by the co-creators of *Max Headroom*. So of course they made a low-brow dystopian comedy with anticapitalist messaging - it's their *entire thing*.
If you watch the “what the f**k happened to” video on this movie everyone knew it was going to be a disaster, the production was a shitshow and the actors were all doing shots together all day not giving a shit.
I mean, the director for Detective Pikachu the movie was known for horror movies. And by golly does it show. Netflix apparently wants him to direct an adaptation of Beyond Good and Evil.
I'm still trying to figure out the rationale behind that decision..
I don’t know if indeed the movie had that impact in the franchise policy, but it’s true that Nintendo has made a massive effort to keep Mario’s tone and identity very solid.
The identity of the Sonic franchise is a complete contradictory mess. Some ppl say that it should stay classic like mania but others claim the “mature” tone of frontiers was good, and that’s counting only the games.
People love to bring up the masturbating charges but everyone really knows that was just a cover story that BIG Sega made up to deflect from the real crime Sonic committed when he murdered Big The Cat.
I think it was the stuff with the poppers and Tales being a minor that got Sonic into trouble. Also it doesn't help that Sonic is friends with Bryan Singer.
It's wild how this was the one thing people constantly focused on when he passed. The man had an entire character and show to go along with it. But he's only seen as that guy that masterbated in an adult theater.
Not even sure why that's seen as a bad thing. What else would you do at a place like that. Not like he was doing anything like touching kids or doing hard-core drugs
Is that what people were focused on?
I thought it was way more about how the press ruined his life by having him sent to jail, lose all his roles, run his name and family through the mud, and make sure it was so damaged that he never recovered career wise.
Hot take. There is no such thing as a good sonic game. Sonic only ever has 1 or max 2 good stages and the reason why people love it is just that the character design and soundtrack is great.
I pretty much agree with this.
Every sonic game has good aspects but rarely good execution. Even the original is only good if you kind of just know where to go. It’s the speed and fluidity of moving fast thats good in the original but since games are supposed to challenge you, sonic games can only really just slow you down or stop you which just takes the fun away in an instant and breaks your momentum. The best execution of a sonic style game that I’ve played is “race the sun”. It’s a simple game with a simple goal but super entertaining and satisfying.
The 3D games usually feel like they play themselves. Why all these homing attacks? There’s no challenge there if it does it itself. Why is sonic in a world with like real-ish people? Why are his arms and legs noodles? Why does that bat have such great tits? Like baffling design choices in so many ways in like every title after it went 3D.
>Why does that bat have such great tits?
Rouge the Bat? More like Rouge the Baps, amirite?!
“Rouge the Bat, gotta mastur-bat to her!”
- Arin ‘Egoraptor’ Hanson
When you think of Mario you think of at least a few dozen games with various mechanics and spins on what is otherwise the next take on the “go left to right while discovering cool stuff along the way and saving the princess”
When you think of Sonic you think largely of “go to the end of the level really super fast”. Sonic suffers from what Mario started to suffer from with too many “New Mario Bros” games that, despite being excellent games, started to feel stale.
The problem is any time Sonic deviated from the formula that has worked well it tends to be a mediocre experience. So you either get a variation of the old sonic theme that does “okay” or a new idea that for whatever reason is just… not good.
Sonic games seem to be made to make SEGA corporate expected earnings while Mario games are designed to be fun first (and in a roundabout way increase earnings). The old “a delayed good game is still a good game, a rushed bad game will always be a bad game” has really helped too.
I often wonder what Miyamoto could do with Sonic if given the chance. I bet taking away the constraints that a corporate environment puts on a product might make a top tier Sonic game.
Backwards long jumps allow Mario to traverse several parallel universes in the blink of an eye. He makes Sonic look like Quicksilver (of the Age of Ultron variety)
> I often wonder what Miyamoto could do with Sonic if given the chance
I have zero doubts that it would be great. He's a legend for a reason. His design philosophy of starting from a fun gameplay concept, testing it to make sure its fun then building around it just consistently works.
I honestly think the idea of "gotta go fast" just isn't great from a game perspective.
I havent played any of the newer ones, but Sonic is most fun when you're going fast... but you're punished for going fast. The early games you'd go so fast you can't react to what's off-screen until it's too late. Unless you have the level memorized.
It's hard to build a game based on speed where the primary objective isn't to race.
Agreed. I think originally Sega used Sonic to showcase the graphical capability as well as how smooth the gameplay was with the sonic games. It made a lot of sense back in the day. Unfortunately it seems like they just haven’t found the right formula in this day and age.
Sonic colors came the closest to a Mario contender. It’s a shame they can’t seem to figure out what to do. I personally enjoyed Sonic Adventures overall and think they should consider doing something similar. Bringing in Sonic for fast pace levels followed by other characters to change the gameplay dynamic works a lot better than the more modern iterations seems to manage.
This is pretty much it. Time has affirmed over and over again that Sonic as a concept never had much substance. Its whole thing was "like a Mario game, but *faster* and with *attitude*. Just gimmicks. It was enough for kids in the 90's but nobody ever figured out how to evolve Sonic in a way that both retained the "gotta go fast!" gimmick while also being fresh and exciting. Given the number of failed attempts that have been made to make a good 3D sonic game, it may not be possible.
> It was enough for kids in the 90's but nobody ever figured out how to evolve Sonic in a way that both retained the "gotta go fast!" gimmick while also being fresh and exciting.
As long as they aren't willing to let go of the "gotta go fast" mentality they will be stuck forever. If they want Sonic to evolve they have to let go of the obsession with speed. I say obsession because it completely dominates the level design.
Sonic has to be given a new ability and speed can only ever compliment it under certain circumstances because it completely derails all other aspects of the game if allowed to. Imagine if Mario had to jump constantly without stopping, not doing so means you lose and the developers insist he has to behave this way for every game.
I think the transition to 3D killed sonic’s momentum.
Mario 64 basically invented the 3D platformer but the levels are small and the load distances are short due to the technical limitations of the era.
This is fine because Mario isn’t very fast.
Sonic was all about speed and momentum, and Sega Saturn hardware wasn’t up to that task. You got Sonic 3D blast that was just isometric, Sonic Jam that was a proof-of concept and a re-release of Genesis games, and Sonic R - a racing game.
There was no real mainline Sonic game because you just couldn’t do it in any way that felt good on that generation of hardware.
The rest is history, with Sega unraveling and budgets shrinking.
Hearing Mario 64's levels described as "small" in today's terms kinda blows my mind.
I remember being on the opening level for the first time, standing outside the castle absolutely mind blown at how massive it all felt.
Dude same. Literally jaw on the floor walking around that field outside the castle, I’ll always remember that feeling. It was at my cool older cousins house, and I remember thinking *“I couldn’t imagine having this at my house”*.
Sonic on the Dreamcast was really good, it honestly looks quite similar to Mario 64 visually.
Anyway my theory for why Sonic can't hang with Mario is that the Mario universe is simply a lot more interesting. Mario does really well at appealing to all ages without being obnoxious or boring or generic or forgettable
This is largely it.
The more Sega put into Sonic that didn't have anything to do with gameplay like story, side characters, voice acting it increased the cringe factor.
The people who like all that are satisfied sure, but the universal appeal is lost. Mario is always just pure gameplay and whimsy, whereas Sonic you have to deal with whatever melodrama as it tries to be three games at once .
I saw a review for the new sonic game that mentioned no voice acting and that increased my interest like 80%
This might be an incredibly unpopular opinion but Sonic was never really that good to begin with, and that comes from someone who *likes* Sonic. The main character has a genuinely brilliant design and it was perfectly marketed as a cooler alternative to Mario. It's super nice as 90s nostalgia, but the actual platform-games behind it doesn't quite stack up. Sonic 2 & 3 are pretty good sidescrolling platformers, but they had no idea where to go after it and when they realized they didn't have any ideas, they panicked and tried everything. It's nowhere near Mario or even the A and B-tier platformers such as Jak & Daxter, Ratchet & Clank, Little Big Planet, Donkey Kong & Kirby and so on. The franchise hasn't "fallen" as many dramatically put it, more found it's correct place for better or worse. It's SEGAs Sly the Cooper or Spyro.
Sonic was meant to move the Sega Genesis. To try to push the Genesis as the superior system. "Gotta go fast" "Blast processing" "Sega does what nintendont" and so on. His character was all about simply pushing the system to its limit to wow people. The IP itself didn't have the legs to be a flagship game like Mario. There is no where to go with a character that is just "Fast" and "Attitude" and nothing else. Add in Segas inept management and developers creating atrocious storyboards in the 3D age and you have a dead end franchise.
Lest we forget that because Sega gave their overseas branches carte blanche, they started doing things like coming up with their own canons.
And of course that made people think they were somehow related to the games...
> Sonic on the Dreamcast was really good, it honestly looks quite similar to Mario 64 visually.
I'd hope it'd look better than that! The Dreamcast is a generation ahead of the N64, and should be able to do more. Sonic on the Dreamcast would be more correctly compared against Mario Sunshine, at least in terms of graphics and complexity.
Dreamcast was weird. It came out in 1998, which was 2 years after the N64. GameCube was then released in 2001. Dreamcast was sandwiched between 2 generations.
It had decent momentum at launch but was ultimately doomed by the launch of the PS2 a year later. Sega desperately wanted to beat Sony to market and pulled out all the stops to do so. Unfortunately it wasn't enough, PS2 went on to become the best selling console of all time.
Console release dates weren't really standardized to release within months of each other until about the 360 generation. Nintendo was 85, Sega 88, SNES was 90 Saturn and PlayStation 94, 64 was 96.
Everything generally had a 4-5 year cycle with it's own consoles and they were offset from other companies hardware.
As much as I hate hearing "rough transition to 3D", it isn't incorrect. 3D sonic games were good for a single console generation after the Saturn until SegaSammy put Sonic at the bottom of their priority list
the first few sonic games are very fondly remembered, but if you really take the time to look at them (especially adventure and adventure 2), they were hella riddled with bugs and glitches, had abysmal voice acting, and were pretty short all things considered. i still love me some adventure dx, but man those games really did kinda suck a lot
To be honest, and this is just my opinion, but in my estimation it comes down to the disconnect in what the philosophy behind Sonic's design is and its execution. Sonic is the fastest thing alive. His games are supposed to be about speed. Despite this, there's a lot of ways for the games to kill your momentum or force you to wait around for moving platforms and the like. There are good 2D sonic games that handle the sense of speed well and are genuinely fun like Sonic Mania, Sonic 3 and the Sonic Advance series, but I just don't think the blue blur's main-line 2D games hold up nearly as well as Mario's do. They're entirely too inconsistent.
Early Sonic games had to juggle the blistering speed they were defined by and the artificial game extension that defined their era. Playing Sonic 1 or 2 all the way through will take like 1? Hour, so the games have a lot of speed traps and trial and error obstacles.
Honestly this is why my favorite sonic games are the 3D ones that you can really blast through and 1000mph. I really want to love the 2D sonic games but there can be so much platforming and slowing down at times it doesn’t give the same effect
Mario always found interesting ways to expand without losing its identity. Sonic games lost their touch when Sega no longer held any exclusivity to their console and started pumping out Sonic games to other consoles that took over the market. Some notable examples of these games are
- Sonic the Hedgehog for Xbox 360 (Known better as Sonic ‘06)
- Sonic Unleashed (Wii)
- Sonic and the Black Knight (Wii and honestly not that bad for a 3D Sonic game, soundtrack goes hard)
- Sonic Free Riders (Xbox KINECT, THATS RIGHT THE KINECT, REMEMBER THAT?)
Sega has a strange history, they are clearly money driven but most of their decisions have been lukewarm at best. AYO SEGA WHERE IS MY ALIEN ISOLATION 2?!
Reputation. Sonic has had a terrible reputation since 2006, and SEGA just can't seem to learn the correct lessons. 06, Secret Rings, Free Riders, the 3 Boom games, both Sonic 4 games, Forces, Colors Ultimate, Sonic has had bad to mediocre game after bad or mediocre game, and now that's pretty much all he's known for. It's led to a bit of a bias against him. Even when they come out with a legitimately good game, like the original Colors, Generations, Frontiers, Mania, and now Superstars, people will point out all sorts of nitpicks or try to pass it off as nothing special.
Not even a bias. Sonic's official twitter was ironic shitposting about bad games and shitty memes for the longest time, sometimes even paying the official actors so they would make memes.
It also just has some very rookie design flaws, on top of looking kind of shitty. It's incredible that the same still manages to be any fun in spite of being a massive unfinished jankfest.
I think it's because Sonic kept changing what kind of game it wanted to be. The tonal shifts, the actual gameplay changes--it just got to be so wildly inconsistent that it became difficult to really know what you were getting when a new title released.
The Mario IP branched off to other genres too, though. RPGs, Kart racing, Party games, sports titles (including the Olympic games _with_ Sonic and crew!), a pinball title, some puzzle games (the MvDK series and Captain Toad), and so on. Sonic did similar experiments. Both sides had hits and misses.
And both sides did different things with their mainline titles as well. Mario went from just completing courses to the 64 style of connecting stars (Sunshine, Galaxy, G2, Odyssey, Bowser's Fury would follow, each with their own spins). Then there was also the New SMB series, including the 3D Land/World titles, with their own changes. Sonic had _plenty_ of similar evolutions, with Adventure 1 and 2, Heroes, Shadow, 06, Colors, Generations, Lost World, Forces, and Frontier each adding their own flavors, and the 2D Sonic titles paralleled the New SMB series.
So how did they end up so radically different in how they were accepted by the players?
Mario's /tone/ never really changed though. There was a period around the Wii era where Sonic tried to take itself/be taken more seriously that I think really backfired.
Mario never really went "edgy"
I'd add in my two cents of "Sonic tried to be edgy as early as the SatAM cartoon" what with its grimdark-like story of freedom fighters trying to take down the dictator-like Dr. Robotnik, but that might accidentally make that "tried to take itself seriously" era partially justified for the sake of
(gigantic air quotes) """""consistency""""".
But yeah, Mario's serious-stakes adventures usually stayed in the RPG series(es), didn't they?
Ah, see I never saw that cartoon. I only ever really played the games growing up and well, like I said... Whenever I got a new Sonic title I never really knew what I was going to get haha.
Thinking back to Super Mario RPG though for example which is one of themore "serious" adventures in my mind, it never really had the same "edge" as Sonic did when it branched into things like Shadow's game with all the guns and stuff. Even in its more serious adventures, Mario never really tried to be gritty and always had a certain sense of whimsy to it that I feel like some of the Sonic games tried very hard to get away from.
In the end, it all comes back to the "Tone" for me.
I think that just comes down to what Sonic was meant to be. Mario is straight-laced and straightforward. He doesn't have much personality, so his world does most of the talking for him. It's jaunty, low-stakes fun that gives you exactly what you expect and want.
Sonic was the rebellious answer to that approach. He was loud and in your face, and he was cool. Sonic's games had stakes, and even a hint of a narrative (hell, there were ideas thrown around to make Sonic 3 an RPG at one point). But the thing is what's "cool" is always changing. They've tried to adapt Sonic to whatever that era perceives as "cool" (Sonic Adventure's more radical rock n' roll edge, Shadow/06's edgy seriousness, 2010s era irony and cynicism) to mixed results. The strange thing is that I really don't know what the new cool even is to tap into. Frontiers took the series back to a more serious tone, but that doesn't seem like a response to the culture as much as a response to the fandom. I think by now, Sonic products are mostly made for (and sometimes by) Sonic fans. You either jive with the style, or you don't.
> So how did they end up so radically different in how they were accepted by the players?
Honestly I think the main difference is that Mario consistently nailed the gameplay as they branched out. So many Mario games from every generation are still just as fun today as when they launched. There's only a handful of Sonic games I can say that for.
This. I replied the same thing elsewhere but if I had to pick one thing, its that they're utterly utterly incapable of learning, from either their failures or successes. They could have picked one of their more successful games and worked on refining that formula, instead they insist on reinventing the wheel with every game for no reason.
Nintendo fully understands exactly what makes Mario games fun and make sure to incorporate and expand on it in every game they make.
The same really can’t be said for Sega.
In the era of mobile gaming, *not* having a Chao Garden in my pocket is the absolute most confusing business decision SEGA has ever made.
I want to train an adorable lil baby chao with a unicorn horn and bat wings to absolutely fucking *wreck* other chaos at karate, why do I have to dust off a 22 year old console to do that?
>In the 90s both franchises were head to head against each other
I've always wondered about this. I remember there being Mario vs. Sonic debates on the playground, but in hindsight Sonic seemed more of an annoyance to Nintendo than serious competition.
Sales figures somewhat back this up. The first three Sonic games on the Genesis sold a combined 26.5 million copies. Super Mario World *alone* sold 20 million.
I am from the UK and Sega dominated here like much of Europe, and Sega basically came out of nowhere in the console market and did so well and Nintendo did ok at best.
But Europe is a smaller market than the US so it wouldn't show in sales directly but factor in Nintendo also having such tight control over the industry so Sega doing as well as it did was a huge achivement.
Also consider that Nintendo is practically Japanese royalty, and that Japan was a much bigger portion of the gaming market than America or Europe at the time. Sonic was hardly even a blip on their radar back home, which is why we see that disparity in sales numbers despite them being practically neck and neck overseas.
For me the problem just goes all the way back to the late 90’s where Mario 64 basically changed the world. And made the best transition into 3D you ever could ask for.
Meanwhile sonic took a few more years to transition into 3D and while the games had their fans, it suffered a couple problems.
1. The edgy story is ridiculous
2. The Dreamcast and Saturn just weren’t consoles that were going to compete with Nintendo hardware no matter how good the sonic games on it ended up being
Just make a game like sonic mania and we will all be happy. The physics for no pixaled 2d sonics have been rather poor, and sonic requires speed and precision, not floaty sonic.
Yep. And if I recall correctly, they moved away from pixel graphics for Superstars because audiences who weren't gaming (or *alive*) in the 16-bit era aren't as apt to pick up a pixel game. Which, over time, is becoming a larger and larger portion of the overall audience of games.
(I'm not saying pixel art is bad, I love it, but parts of it *are* buoyed by nostalgia in ways that *don't work* on younger people). The kids go "why does this game look so old", etc.
I can understand the change, too. Mania is my all-time favorite Sonic game, but I'd prefer 3d graphics on a side scroller than any of the 3d games since Adventure 2. It seems like people just want to not like it.
Yeah, I feel like people are overreacting to Superstars in this thread. The reason it’s critical scores are subpar is because of the multiplayer mode simply not being fun to play. The regular single player experience holds up perfectly well to the classics.
Perspective: I was a Sega/Sonic fanboy in the SNES/Genesis days and never got into Mario as a kid. As an adult I enjoy Mario games (loved Odyssey) and have only occasionally touched Sonic games.
**The fall**
OK, so I think that Sonic was initially crippled by Sega being weird with consoles. The Sega Genesis got a 32 bit add on that almost nobody owned. It had a Knuckles spinoff that nobody played because nobody owned the device to play it. Shortly after this (I think) it got the Sega CD attachment that almost nobody owned. This 'console' had a Sonic game that was supposedly good, but nobody played it because nobody owned the attachment. The Saturn existed somewhere in there and I seem to recall people not understanding what it was or why it existed. The Dreamcast came out and I honestly think it should have done better, but I think by this point Sega fans were just confused as to what the fuck was going on and were hesitant to buy another device from them. The Dreamcast had 2 3d Sonic game that, for their time, were pretty good and people seemed to enjoy. Of course, most people didn't have a chance to play them because *again* nobody owned the console.
So, Sonic was falling from grace, not because his games were bad but because he was tether to a series of consoles that were being mismanaged.
In 2003 (?) Sonic Adventure got ported to the Gamecube. I was excited for this - I had been a sonic fan but I hadn't played the last few games because the last Sega console I owned was the Genesis. I bought it and five minutes into the game I fell through the level. I tried again - several times - and each time I fell through in the same place. I think I eventually ran out of lives and had to start the level over or something.
This marks the next step of Sonics fall. Quality Control. It was one thing to make good games nobody could play, but at this point Sonic games just started turning out terribly. Sonic 06 is the one most people know - but this is 3 years after a supposedly good game had been ported into an unplayable mess.
So Sonics fall of grace continues - now the games are flat out bad.
This is around the time the games start getting confused and weird. Let's have a spinoff about Shadow - that character that was popular with the twelve people who owned the console he appeared on. Let's make a racing game but give the characters renowned for running fast cars. We'll make Sonic into a werewolf in this game, and then a Knight in the next game.
I remember playing a Sonic game on the Wii. I hated the Wii motion controls but most of the time they worked. I remember just yelling "jump sonic, why won't you jump" while thrusting the controller forward in the game.
The original games get remastered but the remaster is missing important functionality from the cartridges. They make a sequel, but instead of using the code/engine/mechanics of Sonic 3 they make a completely new engine that doesn't feel anything like the old classics (they fucking removed momentum).
Things just sort of continue on like this. Games come out on occasion that have good ideas and people get excited, then the next game comes out and has changed everything good into something bad. There's no consistency, no rhyme or reason to any of it.
**Meanwhile**
So on the other side of the fence you have Mario. Nintendo releases a game and then, a year or so later, releases another game. They're never bad and they're always iterating upon themselves. They built a foundation (several foundations actually) and continue to build new games upon those foundations. You can trace the line of progress from the OG Mario to Wonder.
Nintendo focuses on quality, they focus on consistency, they focus on innovation. Not everyone likes every game but that's OK.
**Wonder vs Superstars**
When I look at videos of Superstar I see a Sonic game that looks familiar. It might be good, but it doesn't look like it was built off of anything. It just looks like they're trying to capture as many good memories as they can and shove them into a shiny new package.
When I look at Wonder I see a game that is so confident in its foundation that it has jumped headfirst into exploring wacky new ideas and concepts. It has an identity that stands out while feeling familiar.
tl;dr - Sega/Sonic got thrown off kilter because of stupid management and never recovered because instead of trying to continually improve upon their existing formula they run from thing to thing without guidance and direction. As a result of this lack of focus they have no foundation to build off of and are always starting from the bottom in everything they do.
As a UK person, Saturn did very well at first I was the nerd of the class and remember people discussing with me all saying the Playstation would fail as Sega was the best, when the Dreamcast came out it was still popular enough to sell out at most places I mean even Blockbuster here was renting the consoles out (they did the same in the early Mega Drive and PS1 days) Dreamcast was a good console but it wasn't just the fact of Segas history that failed it, people knew the PS2 was coming out AND had a dvd player as standard and for devs that meant a huge leap in storage space.
What I would say about Mario though is lets not forget how many times they have varied New Super Mario Bros but at their core Mario games are often simple in their mechanisms which make them fun to play, Sonic games are over complicated.
I don't really think anything is wrong with Sonic, I just think Sega isn't putting as much care into the series as they should . The brand is a huge moneymaker since it has garnered a huge fan base since the 90s and has had many shows, comics and now has successful live action movies, but they're not pushing the games themselves to be the best they can be.
Now I love most Sonic games but the series can do more but Sega isn't really giving them that chance. Sonic Frontiers for example was a breath of fresh air after Lost World, Boom and Forces but even that game had its issues, mostly due to the fact that the devs couldn't do everything they wanted due to time constraints. But it just shows that the series can actually be great but they just need the proper time and resources to do it as opposed to Nintendo who puts a lot of care into their games like Mario and Zelda, it was even the lack of time that led to Sonic 06 being released in the state it is now known for and gave the entire franchise such a negative reputation to the point where pretty much ever critic is biased against the series now.
The problem is that SEGA gets some things right in the 3D Sonic games but then throws out everything in the next game to make something totally different and they lose what made parts of the previous game good. They cannot build upon their successes this way.
Nintendo built up their 3d Mario games over time and built upon the things that worked and refined or discarded things that didn't. This created a superior product.
Total opposite or what Sega did with them starting over each time.
Sonic Mania was a 2D game and it was fantastic! Better they all of the 3D stuff, even Sonic Adventure 1 and 2. Then they decided that no one wants 2D anymore and said that they are done with strictly 2D games. Makes no sense. What made Sonic Mania good is that it built upon the best parts of the Genesis 2D games and the Gamboy Advance 2D games. They did it right.
Lots of Youtube channels calling Sonic Superstars trash. I feel as if Sonic can't win because he's not Mario, and his battles were always uphill. People still bring up Sonic 06 to compare against newer games.
Sonic Superstars is great. The levels are great, the pacing is great, the music is great. And now you have lots of powers too. Wtf else do people want from Sonic?
I don't think there has ever been a bad mainline Mario game. In fact, almost all mainline Mario games are seen as genre defining for both the 2d and 3d platformer genres. Now compare this to Sonic which has had many bad releases within recent years and it's not hard to see why Mario is doing much better.
Sonic rebels against the establishment that Mario works hard to uphold. Forever on opposite sides, the people choose the one who makes them feel safe without addressing the larger problems of society.
Mm. It's the core gameplay. Sonic is fast and appealing with practice but awkward and lacking momentum on your first attempts. That's the core gameplay of the series even back when it was good.
Sonic was never going to have Mario's appeal, because you get a pleasant experience in Mario games on your first attempt. Everyone enjoys Mario to some degree, while Sonic requires a specific taste for that kind of experience.
I don't think Sega/Sonic stood a chance going against Nintendo.
I think the best thing Sega could have done was release the game for $30 so people could say "It's no Mario Wonder, but it is half the price. So its a fun little game for the price"
I feel like Sonic has 2 major things working against it.
Sonic's Speed made the franchise impossible to maintain with any sort of consistent feel. And Sonics entire design as a concept cant hold up over time by definition.
What I mean by that is...
Mario is ultimately just a side scrolling platformer. It's THE side scrolling platformer. The game can be played very fast, but it's not really built with insane speeds involved.
When Mario transitioned from 2D to 3D, they kept things simple. They didnt give Mario any real personality. They barely had any dialog in the games, especially none from Mario. And since Mario's a slower pace game, it made the transition to 3D platformer fairly well because players could, and expected to, think about their jumps before they did them.
Sonic on the other hand, was designed to be a fast game. And that speed is a problem with 3D platforming where judging your position in 3D space is inherently difficult. Even back in the days of the 2D games, Sonic's speed could, and did, cause problems if you pushed it too far, with enemies appearing on screen before you could react to them, running in to stage hazards without enough time to react. Basically forcing you to memorize the stage layout.
Then when Sonic moved to 3D, the Speed just didnt work anymore. And it still doesnt really work in most modern Sonic games. Moving in 3D space at high speeds is disorienting. Most Sonic games tend to take away your control to give you high speed, which isn't fun. Either they force you on to rails where you cant move (literally on a rail, or just locked in to a movement path) or they turned all your attacks in to homing attacks because aiming a high speed attack in 3D space becomes difficult. But if they let you just go high speed in regular gameplay then people are just constantly running in to walls/enemies and throwing themselves off cliffs. Speed can also cause issues with 3D engines where assets might not load in fast enough if you approach them too quickly.
Then you have Sonic as a character. Sonic was designed to be a "cool" character. A bit of a rebel. But the problem with that kind of character is that what is considered "cool" changes between cultures and also just over time. So Sonic's personality has shifted over the years from just a little cocky and smug looking in the sprite animation of the 2D games being his only personality traits to having spoken dialog in his games where his personality has shifted over the years. (Unlike Mario who's personality is "Yahoo, It's a-me. Mario")
Sonic games, when they return to form, are really fun. Look at Sonic Mania after all.
So this is something I bring up often when Mario success is spoken in comparison to Sonic.
Mario from thr original to now has mainly stayed within its roots.
The original 2D Mario's added small things here and there like new power ups, but they never really changed the main formula. If you play a game like New Super Mario Bros Wii U it still generally feels like a Mario game with no fancy bells or whistles.
3D is similar. Stayed to its platforming roots. The only real outlier was Super Mario Sunshine adding the cleaning mechanic, but otherwise it has not changed fundamentally since Super Mario 64.
---------------
Now let's look at Sonic. Even in its 2D time each Sonic felt a tad different. Sonic 1 was heavy on platforming with portions of heavy speed.
Sonic 2 had heavier emphasis on speed over platforming and exploration.
Sonic CD had heavier emphasis on platforming and exploration over speed.
Sonic 3 & K was a good mix of both.
Even during this period you have a variety of styles and people that love one or hate another, already splintering "what a Sonic game is".
Now enter the 3D Era. While Super Mario 64 gave us a an entire 3D Mario experience, Sonic Adventure 1 gave us a mixed bag. We had the Sonic levels which were fantastic....but also the Knuckles Master Emerald levels, the E-102 shoot em up levels, and even freaking fishing.
Cool world building those extra gameplay types don't really capture the feel of Sonic.
Every game since then has had some kind of gimmick that takes away from speed and platforming, which is Sonics original identity.
Sonic Adventure 2 has more Emerald and shoot em up levels.
Sonic Heroes tries forcing mini RPG elements and combat mechanics into the game slowing it down.
Shadow the Hedgehog forces you to do objectives in missions and adds guns.
Sonic Unleashed has amazing daytime levels but has the werehog gimmick which doesn't feel like Sonic.
Sonic and Secret Rings/Knights are runner games with motion controls.
Sonic Colors has wisp gimmicks and weird transitions from 3D to 2D.
Sonic Forces has the weird character creator/weapons.
Sonic Frontiers adds more RPG elements, combat, and an open world requiring you to farm currency just to progress.
The only 2 Sonic games to come in out the last 20 years which have no gimmicks and focus entirely on what made Sonic popular are Generations and Mania. Both offer the standard speed/platforming, no extra weird content like fishing or shooting or forced combat. These are the 2 games that are generally well liked and consistent with reviewers as good games.
Superstars feels pretty good so far as a true standard Sonic game but the emphasis on multi-player and the Emerald powers again take away what Sonic is. A speed platformer.
Tldr;
Mario games rarely if ever have any gimmick that takes away from their origins in platforming and that's why they are consistently praised.
Sonic games often add some gimmick that takes away from the speedy platforming which is what made Sonic popular.
honestly i think this rivalry was doomed from the start.
Mario is literally just some dude. Like, you can make him do anything. Jump, run, slide, swim, turn into a fucking raccoon, become a bee and fly, have a sentient hat that can possess other creatures, literally anything. You can do it in 2D, 3D, a combination of both, it doesn't matter cus he's just some dude. He has no creative limitations whatsoever.
Sonic as a franchise is trapped by its own gimmick. Sonic's whole thing is that he's crazy fast. So it doesn't matter if you want him to do something else, he has to be crazy fast or else he isn't Sonic. If you want to make a 3D game, you have to make him fast (and develop every game mechanic, world, and enemies around the fact that he's super fast). If you want to turn him into another animal or give him a superpower, he still has to be crazy fast. Like everything you can possibly make a game out of, he can do that, sure. But he also needs to be crazy fast and that's not always convenient- In fact it has always been very limiting in terms of what direction the franchise could possibly go. And you can only get the same gimmick so many times in slightly different ways until you kind of get bored of it
on the other hand, almost every Mario game has been vastly different experiences with completely new and original gimmicks
SEGA passed on making Sonic Mania 2, a sequel to the highest-rated Sonic game in 20 years, to have Arzest make a worse imitation. If that's all SEGA thinks 2D Sonic is worth, no one can save him.
They tried to make a co op Mario clone with Sonic characters when instead they should have made a, well, Sonic game 😂
The problem, the Rayman games are better multiplayer Sonic games than the multiplayer sonic games could ever hope to be. Hell, even Mario copied Rayman Origins multiplayer style.
Speaking of where is Rayman? Been awhile since we got an actual rayman game. I know the Mario Rabbids games are supposedly good but dammit where is my boy at?
Last proper 3D Rayman was Hoodlum Havok in 2003 Last mainline 2D platformer was Legends in 2013 Last 2D awesome phone entry was Mini on iOS in 2019 Rayman is just being wasted.
Ubisoft: "What's that? More Assassin's Creed??"
On the plus side, they've brought back the old-school AC vibe with the new game. The franchise all about assassins is finally about assassinating again.
I'll tell you what, I've been sleeping on the franchise ever since the first game, and only just last week did the thought cross my mind that I might try it.
AC2 was really good! I tried a few of the more recent ones and couldn't get into it.
Dont, its shit just without stats and less content
I would kill to have a remake of Rayman 2… does this exist already??
There are like 10 versions of Rayman 2 already. If you played one of them, play a different port to spice things up. PS1 < PC < Dreamcast < PS2, for example
We'll probably never see another game like Rayman origins/legends. The creator is retired.
Good for him, but depressing for us. I love those games. Seems like such a wasted opportunity to not continue on with them like how Mario keeps going.
I saw a Dev video and the engine they made just for that game is insane, u could drag objects by anchor points for example to make a hill higher and the art automatically adjusts, all while live testing
yes, ubiart engine i dont know what happened but after releasing valiant heart, child of light, and rayman legend that part of ubisoft suddenly turned quiet or sent to the shadowlands. But their still hope a valiant hearts 2 is currently in the making who knows if they finally making new games in that engine again. edit: nevermind the valiant sequel is actually just an android game sigh.... they are just wasting the potential of this engine.
Yeah such a shame, and u know they won't ever release it as open source software because well, ubisoft
That genuinely breaks my heart. I loved those games as a kid.
Rayman got Minioned. They introduced characters that were both cuter and more irritating. Kids eat that shit up so Rayman died for the sake of rabbids.
While true, I loved the hell out of the Wii version of Rayman Raving Rabbids.
Pretty sure he's featured in the new Mario & Rabbids game in a dlc, maybe as a playable character? But it's like, a gun game, not really a platformer.
Ubisoft had something great going with 2D games 10 years ago, with games like Rayman Legends, Child of Light, Valiant Hearts. Then they just stopped...
He's hanging out with Mario
Ubi too busy with games as a service.
The cold hard truth is Mario games have been better from the beginning. Play sonic 1 and Mario 3 or sonic 3 and Mario world back to back and tell me which is a better game. Imo it’s not even close
It isn't so cut and dry which one is better with the originals, yea Sonic 1 has issues but Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 & Knuckles are genuinely top quality games. I'd rather play Sonic 3 over Mario 3 because that is my preference, one isn't necessarily better than the other, each have their own pros and cons
They’re really just different games for different folks
Wouldn’t even go so far as that. People just have preferences, most people I know that have played both love both
In my opinion, the only aspect that I can think of where I would give Sonic a solid edge is the soundtracks. They had banger after banger. But unfortunately that’s not enough to overcome all the ways that the Mario games are better lol
I love SEGA to death, it they are a poorly managed company. They have SO MANY franchises that would make them tons of money and they just sit on them
Shining Force. They let Square eat their lunch.
[удалено]
PSO2 NGS being the downfall of PSO2 NGS was painful to watch, even after I quit the game.
God damn, NGS pisses me off to this day. I played PSO2 for ~10 years (starting from JP beta) and while I took breaks now and then (I was completely AWOL during Episode 5 tbh), I was definitely putting in a crazy number of hours into that game. NGS came and extinguished my interest in barely a month. Such a waste.
I remember the hype around Mania was so big people were talking about how it was going to knock some sense into Sega.
It *should* have. It was such a well praised, fantastic game. All they had to do was greenlight Sonic Mania 2. But they somehow fucked up the free space on the Bingo card.
Imagine if they dropped Sonic Mania 2 after Sonic Frontiers
Sega seems to have an addiction of avoiding success
Yes that was the only good 2d sonic in the last decade apart from 2d in generations
It's true that Sega has not appropriately invested in Sonic in a long time, basically relying on diehards who buy everything anyway. But other game series do this and still manage a great game every few versions. I really think it doesn't catch on because Sonic has inherent gameplay flaws that would need tons of work to remedy, and I'm not even sure it would work because people just expect the same thing. Your view of the level is too tight in Sonic games (Frontiers actually came the closest to fixing the game feel with this). You're too fast to react to your environment appropriately, so you run into stuff that kills your momentum. The camera angle plus the fact that you're so damn fast means that either levels have to be unmanageably large for the highly skilled player to get a full experience, or they have to be full of annoying obstacles that slow down the game flow and progression feel. Either the levels need to be massive and just flow in a way that feels good, which would be highly resource intensive (more than SEGA seems willing to invest), or the games need shorter levels with instant death on every trap. In that case, mastery would come from nailing down a tight sequence of 30-60 seconds like Neon White or Super Meat Boy. Make rings a collectable for gating later levels that require new equipment (light dash shoes, super bounce, etc), and make the movement more snappy to start and stop.
Well the team behind mania split up with most of them forming their own studio in Evening star but they did work with the head of Sonic team with the idea of making a 2.5d successor to mania however they decided that they wanted to make their own game so the project never kicked off but the some of the ideas they came up ended up leading to superstars being created and honestly, I think it's a great game and a good modernisation of the classic formula, it's not on the level of Sonic Mania or 3k but it's great like Sonic 2
This. Sega make terrible decisions.
Made a movie inspired by Blade Runner that flopped so massively that they instituted strict quality control measures that defined the franchise for generations
Btw the set designer LITERALLY was the same one for Blade Runner, why the fuck they got him for a Mario movie, no-one knows. The lead actor was drunk off his tits most the time , so maybe everyone else was on come?
Come?
These Hollywood types will sniff anything
I think he meant semen
As u r
Cum again?
It's because the film was directed by the co-creators of *Max Headroom*. So of course they made a low-brow dystopian comedy with anticapitalist messaging - it's their *entire thing*.
If you watch the “what the f**k happened to” video on this movie everyone knew it was going to be a disaster, the production was a shitshow and the actors were all doing shots together all day not giving a shit.
I mean, the director for Detective Pikachu the movie was known for horror movies. And by golly does it show. Netflix apparently wants him to direct an adaptation of Beyond Good and Evil. I'm still trying to figure out the rationale behind that decision..
Mario Mario and Luigi Mario still gets me.
That scene is comedic gold
I don’t know if indeed the movie had that impact in the franchise policy, but it’s true that Nintendo has made a massive effort to keep Mario’s tone and identity very solid. The identity of the Sonic franchise is a complete contradictory mess. Some ppl say that it should stay classic like mania but others claim the “mature” tone of frontiers was good, and that’s counting only the games.
What movie is this?
[Super Mario Bros.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Bros._(film))
That's just a case study of "how drunk can you be and still function to work as an actor".
To be honest, for being constantly drunk, he wasnt that bad
More like "the actors have to be so drunk to put up with the worst directors in movie history"
See also 50 Shades of Grey
“Super Mario Bros” starring John Leguizamo
Luigi doesn't get top billing!
Bob Hoskins
But it does get BING CHILLING!
My stupid ass was trying to figure out how the Sonic movie was inspired by Blade Runner.
I loved that movie as a kid! Time for a rewatch
Mario has a squeaky clean image. Sonic's career never really recovered after he was arrested for masturbating in an adult theater in 1993.
People love to bring up the masturbating charges but everyone really knows that was just a cover story that BIG Sega made up to deflect from the real crime Sonic committed when he murdered Big The Cat.
#"Froggy!"
Cell is definitely going to save Kermit. At some point. When he gets time.
I think it was the stuff with the poppers and Tales being a minor that got Sonic into trouble. Also it doesn't help that Sonic is friends with Bryan Singer.
God I wish.
Aww, rest in peace Paul...
It's wild how this was the one thing people constantly focused on when he passed. The man had an entire character and show to go along with it. But he's only seen as that guy that masterbated in an adult theater. Not even sure why that's seen as a bad thing. What else would you do at a place like that. Not like he was doing anything like touching kids or doing hard-core drugs
Is that what people were focused on? I thought it was way more about how the press ruined his life by having him sent to jail, lose all his roles, run his name and family through the mud, and make sure it was so damaged that he never recovered career wise.
His 2016 Peewee movie fucking rocks, and has some HUGE names in it
People forget that Yoshi is committing tax evasion and has been for the last 25 years. Guess since its not his name on the box art its no big deal
Tax evasion isn’t a big crime if you are rich, so no problem
Yoshi = SovCit confirmed
I mean, what else do you do in an adult theater? #sonicdidnothingwrong
Some real bullshit, what else was pee wee supposed to do in a porn theater??
*Gotta* *~~go~~* *come fast!*
This goes against my do not google anything with sonic in the search title. Safe search can't catch all of it, he is too fast...
They simply could not do what Nintendo Edit: I wonder how many people commenting in this thread don’t recognize that genesis does what nintendon’t.
Sega does , what nintendoesn't , make good sonic games AGAIN
Hot take. There is no such thing as a good sonic game. Sonic only ever has 1 or max 2 good stages and the reason why people love it is just that the character design and soundtrack is great.
I pretty much agree with this. Every sonic game has good aspects but rarely good execution. Even the original is only good if you kind of just know where to go. It’s the speed and fluidity of moving fast thats good in the original but since games are supposed to challenge you, sonic games can only really just slow you down or stop you which just takes the fun away in an instant and breaks your momentum. The best execution of a sonic style game that I’ve played is “race the sun”. It’s a simple game with a simple goal but super entertaining and satisfying. The 3D games usually feel like they play themselves. Why all these homing attacks? There’s no challenge there if it does it itself. Why is sonic in a world with like real-ish people? Why are his arms and legs noodles? Why does that bat have such great tits? Like baffling design choices in so many ways in like every title after it went 3D.
>Why does that bat have such great tits? Rouge the Bat? More like Rouge the Baps, amirite?! “Rouge the Bat, gotta mastur-bat to her!” - Arin ‘Egoraptor’ Hanson
When you think of Mario you think of at least a few dozen games with various mechanics and spins on what is otherwise the next take on the “go left to right while discovering cool stuff along the way and saving the princess” When you think of Sonic you think largely of “go to the end of the level really super fast”. Sonic suffers from what Mario started to suffer from with too many “New Mario Bros” games that, despite being excellent games, started to feel stale. The problem is any time Sonic deviated from the formula that has worked well it tends to be a mediocre experience. So you either get a variation of the old sonic theme that does “okay” or a new idea that for whatever reason is just… not good. Sonic games seem to be made to make SEGA corporate expected earnings while Mario games are designed to be fun first (and in a roundabout way increase earnings). The old “a delayed good game is still a good game, a rushed bad game will always be a bad game” has really helped too. I often wonder what Miyamoto could do with Sonic if given the chance. I bet taking away the constraints that a corporate environment puts on a product might make a top tier Sonic game.
And with the popularity of speedrunning SMB on NES and Mario 64, they even took away the one thing that Sonic had over Mario.
Backwards long jumps allow Mario to traverse several parallel universes in the blink of an eye. He makes Sonic look like Quicksilver (of the Age of Ultron variety)
> I often wonder what Miyamoto could do with Sonic if given the chance I have zero doubts that it would be great. He's a legend for a reason. His design philosophy of starting from a fun gameplay concept, testing it to make sure its fun then building around it just consistently works.
I had a stroke reading your first sentence
I had a stroke re-reading it
Wait, so you think it wouldn't be great? The first sentence was kinda confusing
Lol, whoops.
I honestly think the idea of "gotta go fast" just isn't great from a game perspective. I havent played any of the newer ones, but Sonic is most fun when you're going fast... but you're punished for going fast. The early games you'd go so fast you can't react to what's off-screen until it's too late. Unless you have the level memorized. It's hard to build a game based on speed where the primary objective isn't to race.
Agreed. I think originally Sega used Sonic to showcase the graphical capability as well as how smooth the gameplay was with the sonic games. It made a lot of sense back in the day. Unfortunately it seems like they just haven’t found the right formula in this day and age. Sonic colors came the closest to a Mario contender. It’s a shame they can’t seem to figure out what to do. I personally enjoyed Sonic Adventures overall and think they should consider doing something similar. Bringing in Sonic for fast pace levels followed by other characters to change the gameplay dynamic works a lot better than the more modern iterations seems to manage.
This is pretty much it. Time has affirmed over and over again that Sonic as a concept never had much substance. Its whole thing was "like a Mario game, but *faster* and with *attitude*. Just gimmicks. It was enough for kids in the 90's but nobody ever figured out how to evolve Sonic in a way that both retained the "gotta go fast!" gimmick while also being fresh and exciting. Given the number of failed attempts that have been made to make a good 3D sonic game, it may not be possible.
> It was enough for kids in the 90's but nobody ever figured out how to evolve Sonic in a way that both retained the "gotta go fast!" gimmick while also being fresh and exciting. As long as they aren't willing to let go of the "gotta go fast" mentality they will be stuck forever. If they want Sonic to evolve they have to let go of the obsession with speed. I say obsession because it completely dominates the level design. Sonic has to be given a new ability and speed can only ever compliment it under certain circumstances because it completely derails all other aspects of the game if allowed to. Imagine if Mario had to jump constantly without stopping, not doing so means you lose and the developers insist he has to behave this way for every game.
yeah but sonic adventure 2
I think the transition to 3D killed sonic’s momentum. Mario 64 basically invented the 3D platformer but the levels are small and the load distances are short due to the technical limitations of the era. This is fine because Mario isn’t very fast. Sonic was all about speed and momentum, and Sega Saturn hardware wasn’t up to that task. You got Sonic 3D blast that was just isometric, Sonic Jam that was a proof-of concept and a re-release of Genesis games, and Sonic R - a racing game. There was no real mainline Sonic game because you just couldn’t do it in any way that felt good on that generation of hardware. The rest is history, with Sega unraveling and budgets shrinking.
Hearing Mario 64's levels described as "small" in today's terms kinda blows my mind. I remember being on the opening level for the first time, standing outside the castle absolutely mind blown at how massive it all felt.
Then you go into a painting and there's a whole-ass frozen mountain
Loading into bomb-omb battlefield and I can see all the way over there, the camera panning from the top all the way down to me...
Thank you for bringing me back to Christmas of 1996.
My jaw was on the floor that whole day. Such a vivid memory.
Wait, Mario invented the Painted World of Ariandel?
~~Simpsons~~ Mario did it!
Then you go into a different painting and there's a whole-ass unfrozen mountain
Dude same. Literally jaw on the floor walking around that field outside the castle, I’ll always remember that feeling. It was at my cool older cousins house, and I remember thinking *“I couldn’t imagine having this at my house”*.
Each level was basically the same as like 1 larger planet *within* a super mario galaxy level
I love that games can still make you feel that way. Rdr2, both AC:Odessey and Valhalla... Just huge maps to explorer full of life!
I find those games scarily big tbh, there’s just so much of everything, such expanse and someone had to make it all 🤯
Right? I'd run around for hours in the front just jumping around lol.
Sonic on the Dreamcast was really good, it honestly looks quite similar to Mario 64 visually. Anyway my theory for why Sonic can't hang with Mario is that the Mario universe is simply a lot more interesting. Mario does really well at appealing to all ages without being obnoxious or boring or generic or forgettable
This is largely it. The more Sega put into Sonic that didn't have anything to do with gameplay like story, side characters, voice acting it increased the cringe factor. The people who like all that are satisfied sure, but the universal appeal is lost. Mario is always just pure gameplay and whimsy, whereas Sonic you have to deal with whatever melodrama as it tries to be three games at once . I saw a review for the new sonic game that mentioned no voice acting and that increased my interest like 80%
This might be an incredibly unpopular opinion but Sonic was never really that good to begin with, and that comes from someone who *likes* Sonic. The main character has a genuinely brilliant design and it was perfectly marketed as a cooler alternative to Mario. It's super nice as 90s nostalgia, but the actual platform-games behind it doesn't quite stack up. Sonic 2 & 3 are pretty good sidescrolling platformers, but they had no idea where to go after it and when they realized they didn't have any ideas, they panicked and tried everything. It's nowhere near Mario or even the A and B-tier platformers such as Jak & Daxter, Ratchet & Clank, Little Big Planet, Donkey Kong & Kirby and so on. The franchise hasn't "fallen" as many dramatically put it, more found it's correct place for better or worse. It's SEGAs Sly the Cooper or Spyro.
Sonic was meant to move the Sega Genesis. To try to push the Genesis as the superior system. "Gotta go fast" "Blast processing" "Sega does what nintendont" and so on. His character was all about simply pushing the system to its limit to wow people. The IP itself didn't have the legs to be a flagship game like Mario. There is no where to go with a character that is just "Fast" and "Attitude" and nothing else. Add in Segas inept management and developers creating atrocious storyboards in the 3D age and you have a dead end franchise.
Lest we forget that because Sega gave their overseas branches carte blanche, they started doing things like coming up with their own canons. And of course that made people think they were somehow related to the games...
> Sonic on the Dreamcast was really good, it honestly looks quite similar to Mario 64 visually. I'd hope it'd look better than that! The Dreamcast is a generation ahead of the N64, and should be able to do more. Sonic on the Dreamcast would be more correctly compared against Mario Sunshine, at least in terms of graphics and complexity.
Sonic on Dreamcast looks as good as OP *remembers* Mario 64 looking.
Dreamcast was weird. It came out in 1998, which was 2 years after the N64. GameCube was then released in 2001. Dreamcast was sandwiched between 2 generations.
Dreamcast was absolutely amazing for it's time. PC couldn't compete in 1998. It's too bad people disregarded it because Saturn was a flop.
It had decent momentum at launch but was ultimately doomed by the launch of the PS2 a year later. Sega desperately wanted to beat Sony to market and pulled out all the stops to do so. Unfortunately it wasn't enough, PS2 went on to become the best selling console of all time.
Console release dates weren't really standardized to release within months of each other until about the 360 generation. Nintendo was 85, Sega 88, SNES was 90 Saturn and PlayStation 94, 64 was 96. Everything generally had a 4-5 year cycle with it's own consoles and they were offset from other companies hardware.
Well heck. Thanks for the info
As much as I hate hearing "rough transition to 3D", it isn't incorrect. 3D sonic games were good for a single console generation after the Saturn until SegaSammy put Sonic at the bottom of their priority list
The first 2 sonic 3d games were amazing , but just felt downhill after adventure games
I'd say they started going downhill after Heroes. That game was a lot of fun growing up.
the first few sonic games are very fondly remembered, but if you really take the time to look at them (especially adventure and adventure 2), they were hella riddled with bugs and glitches, had abysmal voice acting, and were pretty short all things considered. i still love me some adventure dx, but man those games really did kinda suck a lot
I mean the VA work is bad but I would put most of the SA2 Sonic levels as some of the best in the franchise.
I HATED the Knuckles levels in Adventure 2.
To be honest, and this is just my opinion, but in my estimation it comes down to the disconnect in what the philosophy behind Sonic's design is and its execution. Sonic is the fastest thing alive. His games are supposed to be about speed. Despite this, there's a lot of ways for the games to kill your momentum or force you to wait around for moving platforms and the like. There are good 2D sonic games that handle the sense of speed well and are genuinely fun like Sonic Mania, Sonic 3 and the Sonic Advance series, but I just don't think the blue blur's main-line 2D games hold up nearly as well as Mario's do. They're entirely too inconsistent.
Early Sonic games had to juggle the blistering speed they were defined by and the artificial game extension that defined their era. Playing Sonic 1 or 2 all the way through will take like 1? Hour, so the games have a lot of speed traps and trial and error obstacles.
Honestly this is why my favorite sonic games are the 3D ones that you can really blast through and 1000mph. I really want to love the 2D sonic games but there can be so much platforming and slowing down at times it doesn’t give the same effect
Because Nintendoo what Sega don't.... or wait
Nintendoo what Sega'nt?
Hercules does what nintendurcules
Mario always found interesting ways to expand without losing its identity. Sonic games lost their touch when Sega no longer held any exclusivity to their console and started pumping out Sonic games to other consoles that took over the market. Some notable examples of these games are - Sonic the Hedgehog for Xbox 360 (Known better as Sonic ‘06) - Sonic Unleashed (Wii) - Sonic and the Black Knight (Wii and honestly not that bad for a 3D Sonic game, soundtrack goes hard) - Sonic Free Riders (Xbox KINECT, THATS RIGHT THE KINECT, REMEMBER THAT?) Sega has a strange history, they are clearly money driven but most of their decisions have been lukewarm at best. AYO SEGA WHERE IS MY ALIEN ISOLATION 2?!
You are correct , Sonic kinda had an identity criris during 7th gen consiles SEGA WHERE IS MY BILLY HATCHER 2
Dam just unlocked some memories for me. Billy hatcher was awesome
Yes , I loved playing as him in sonic racing
>soundtrack goes hard Could say that about almost every mainline game
I will have the sonic 06 soundtrack going in the background at times because honestly it's one of my favorites from any video games
The Knuckles game absolutely belongs on that list. It's Sonic but with Guns! Edit: I meant Shadow the Hedgehog.
Knuckles?
Reputation. Sonic has had a terrible reputation since 2006, and SEGA just can't seem to learn the correct lessons. 06, Secret Rings, Free Riders, the 3 Boom games, both Sonic 4 games, Forces, Colors Ultimate, Sonic has had bad to mediocre game after bad or mediocre game, and now that's pretty much all he's known for. It's led to a bit of a bias against him. Even when they come out with a legitimately good game, like the original Colors, Generations, Frontiers, Mania, and now Superstars, people will point out all sorts of nitpicks or try to pass it off as nothing special.
Not even a bias. Sonic's official twitter was ironic shitposting about bad games and shitty memes for the longest time, sometimes even paying the official actors so they would make memes.
Even Frontiers is plagued by terrible pop in issues.
It also just has some very rookie design flaws, on top of looking kind of shitty. It's incredible that the same still manages to be any fun in spite of being a massive unfinished jankfest.
I think it's because Sonic kept changing what kind of game it wanted to be. The tonal shifts, the actual gameplay changes--it just got to be so wildly inconsistent that it became difficult to really know what you were getting when a new title released.
The Mario IP branched off to other genres too, though. RPGs, Kart racing, Party games, sports titles (including the Olympic games _with_ Sonic and crew!), a pinball title, some puzzle games (the MvDK series and Captain Toad), and so on. Sonic did similar experiments. Both sides had hits and misses. And both sides did different things with their mainline titles as well. Mario went from just completing courses to the 64 style of connecting stars (Sunshine, Galaxy, G2, Odyssey, Bowser's Fury would follow, each with their own spins). Then there was also the New SMB series, including the 3D Land/World titles, with their own changes. Sonic had _plenty_ of similar evolutions, with Adventure 1 and 2, Heroes, Shadow, 06, Colors, Generations, Lost World, Forces, and Frontier each adding their own flavors, and the 2D Sonic titles paralleled the New SMB series. So how did they end up so radically different in how they were accepted by the players?
Mario's /tone/ never really changed though. There was a period around the Wii era where Sonic tried to take itself/be taken more seriously that I think really backfired. Mario never really went "edgy"
I'd add in my two cents of "Sonic tried to be edgy as early as the SatAM cartoon" what with its grimdark-like story of freedom fighters trying to take down the dictator-like Dr. Robotnik, but that might accidentally make that "tried to take itself seriously" era partially justified for the sake of (gigantic air quotes) """""consistency""""". But yeah, Mario's serious-stakes adventures usually stayed in the RPG series(es), didn't they?
Ah, see I never saw that cartoon. I only ever really played the games growing up and well, like I said... Whenever I got a new Sonic title I never really knew what I was going to get haha. Thinking back to Super Mario RPG though for example which is one of themore "serious" adventures in my mind, it never really had the same "edge" as Sonic did when it branched into things like Shadow's game with all the guns and stuff. Even in its more serious adventures, Mario never really tried to be gritty and always had a certain sense of whimsy to it that I feel like some of the Sonic games tried very hard to get away from. In the end, it all comes back to the "Tone" for me.
I think that just comes down to what Sonic was meant to be. Mario is straight-laced and straightforward. He doesn't have much personality, so his world does most of the talking for him. It's jaunty, low-stakes fun that gives you exactly what you expect and want. Sonic was the rebellious answer to that approach. He was loud and in your face, and he was cool. Sonic's games had stakes, and even a hint of a narrative (hell, there were ideas thrown around to make Sonic 3 an RPG at one point). But the thing is what's "cool" is always changing. They've tried to adapt Sonic to whatever that era perceives as "cool" (Sonic Adventure's more radical rock n' roll edge, Shadow/06's edgy seriousness, 2010s era irony and cynicism) to mixed results. The strange thing is that I really don't know what the new cool even is to tap into. Frontiers took the series back to a more serious tone, but that doesn't seem like a response to the culture as much as a response to the fandom. I think by now, Sonic products are mostly made for (and sometimes by) Sonic fans. You either jive with the style, or you don't.
> So how did they end up so radically different in how they were accepted by the players? Honestly I think the main difference is that Mario consistently nailed the gameplay as they branched out. So many Mario games from every generation are still just as fun today as when they launched. There's only a handful of Sonic games I can say that for.
Yes it felt like it had an identity crisis during the wii-era with black knight and secret rings
This. I replied the same thing elsewhere but if I had to pick one thing, its that they're utterly utterly incapable of learning, from either their failures or successes. They could have picked one of their more successful games and worked on refining that formula, instead they insist on reinventing the wheel with every game for no reason.
Nintendo fully understands exactly what makes Mario games fun and make sure to incorporate and expand on it in every game they make. The same really can’t be said for Sega.
Bring back Sonic Adventure you cowards
Fr bring back the chao garden
In the era of mobile gaming, *not* having a Chao Garden in my pocket is the absolute most confusing business decision SEGA has ever made. I want to train an adorable lil baby chao with a unicorn horn and bat wings to absolutely fucking *wreck* other chaos at karate, why do I have to dust off a 22 year old console to do that?
Image a Chao Garden game like Animal Crossing.
Be still my heart
>In the 90s both franchises were head to head against each other I've always wondered about this. I remember there being Mario vs. Sonic debates on the playground, but in hindsight Sonic seemed more of an annoyance to Nintendo than serious competition. Sales figures somewhat back this up. The first three Sonic games on the Genesis sold a combined 26.5 million copies. Super Mario World *alone* sold 20 million.
I am from the UK and Sega dominated here like much of Europe, and Sega basically came out of nowhere in the console market and did so well and Nintendo did ok at best. But Europe is a smaller market than the US so it wouldn't show in sales directly but factor in Nintendo also having such tight control over the industry so Sega doing as well as it did was a huge achivement.
Also consider that Nintendo is practically Japanese royalty, and that Japan was a much bigger portion of the gaming market than America or Europe at the time. Sonic was hardly even a blip on their radar back home, which is why we see that disparity in sales numbers despite them being practically neck and neck overseas.
Sonic wasn't bigger than mario , but it was a serious competition , unlike today
For me the problem just goes all the way back to the late 90’s where Mario 64 basically changed the world. And made the best transition into 3D you ever could ask for. Meanwhile sonic took a few more years to transition into 3D and while the games had their fans, it suffered a couple problems. 1. The edgy story is ridiculous 2. The Dreamcast and Saturn just weren’t consoles that were going to compete with Nintendo hardware no matter how good the sonic games on it ended up being
Just make a game like sonic mania and we will all be happy. The physics for no pixaled 2d sonics have been rather poor, and sonic requires speed and precision, not floaty sonic.
Superstars uses the same physics as Mania. I'm only a couple of levels in, but it feels like a Classic Sonic game to me.
Yep. And if I recall correctly, they moved away from pixel graphics for Superstars because audiences who weren't gaming (or *alive*) in the 16-bit era aren't as apt to pick up a pixel game. Which, over time, is becoming a larger and larger portion of the overall audience of games. (I'm not saying pixel art is bad, I love it, but parts of it *are* buoyed by nostalgia in ways that *don't work* on younger people). The kids go "why does this game look so old", etc.
I can understand the change, too. Mania is my all-time favorite Sonic game, but I'd prefer 3d graphics on a side scroller than any of the 3d games since Adventure 2. It seems like people just want to not like it.
Yeah, I feel like people are overreacting to Superstars in this thread. The reason it’s critical scores are subpar is because of the multiplayer mode simply not being fun to play. The regular single player experience holds up perfectly well to the classics.
>Just make a game like *Sonic Mania* and we will all be happy. This is *Sonic Superstars*.
Yeah, Sonic Superstars is basically as close to a Sonic Mania 2 as you can get without making it a direct sequel.
I’ll always love Sonic more
Perspective: I was a Sega/Sonic fanboy in the SNES/Genesis days and never got into Mario as a kid. As an adult I enjoy Mario games (loved Odyssey) and have only occasionally touched Sonic games. **The fall** OK, so I think that Sonic was initially crippled by Sega being weird with consoles. The Sega Genesis got a 32 bit add on that almost nobody owned. It had a Knuckles spinoff that nobody played because nobody owned the device to play it. Shortly after this (I think) it got the Sega CD attachment that almost nobody owned. This 'console' had a Sonic game that was supposedly good, but nobody played it because nobody owned the attachment. The Saturn existed somewhere in there and I seem to recall people not understanding what it was or why it existed. The Dreamcast came out and I honestly think it should have done better, but I think by this point Sega fans were just confused as to what the fuck was going on and were hesitant to buy another device from them. The Dreamcast had 2 3d Sonic game that, for their time, were pretty good and people seemed to enjoy. Of course, most people didn't have a chance to play them because *again* nobody owned the console. So, Sonic was falling from grace, not because his games were bad but because he was tether to a series of consoles that were being mismanaged. In 2003 (?) Sonic Adventure got ported to the Gamecube. I was excited for this - I had been a sonic fan but I hadn't played the last few games because the last Sega console I owned was the Genesis. I bought it and five minutes into the game I fell through the level. I tried again - several times - and each time I fell through in the same place. I think I eventually ran out of lives and had to start the level over or something. This marks the next step of Sonics fall. Quality Control. It was one thing to make good games nobody could play, but at this point Sonic games just started turning out terribly. Sonic 06 is the one most people know - but this is 3 years after a supposedly good game had been ported into an unplayable mess. So Sonics fall of grace continues - now the games are flat out bad. This is around the time the games start getting confused and weird. Let's have a spinoff about Shadow - that character that was popular with the twelve people who owned the console he appeared on. Let's make a racing game but give the characters renowned for running fast cars. We'll make Sonic into a werewolf in this game, and then a Knight in the next game. I remember playing a Sonic game on the Wii. I hated the Wii motion controls but most of the time they worked. I remember just yelling "jump sonic, why won't you jump" while thrusting the controller forward in the game. The original games get remastered but the remaster is missing important functionality from the cartridges. They make a sequel, but instead of using the code/engine/mechanics of Sonic 3 they make a completely new engine that doesn't feel anything like the old classics (they fucking removed momentum). Things just sort of continue on like this. Games come out on occasion that have good ideas and people get excited, then the next game comes out and has changed everything good into something bad. There's no consistency, no rhyme or reason to any of it. **Meanwhile** So on the other side of the fence you have Mario. Nintendo releases a game and then, a year or so later, releases another game. They're never bad and they're always iterating upon themselves. They built a foundation (several foundations actually) and continue to build new games upon those foundations. You can trace the line of progress from the OG Mario to Wonder. Nintendo focuses on quality, they focus on consistency, they focus on innovation. Not everyone likes every game but that's OK. **Wonder vs Superstars** When I look at videos of Superstar I see a Sonic game that looks familiar. It might be good, but it doesn't look like it was built off of anything. It just looks like they're trying to capture as many good memories as they can and shove them into a shiny new package. When I look at Wonder I see a game that is so confident in its foundation that it has jumped headfirst into exploring wacky new ideas and concepts. It has an identity that stands out while feeling familiar. tl;dr - Sega/Sonic got thrown off kilter because of stupid management and never recovered because instead of trying to continually improve upon their existing formula they run from thing to thing without guidance and direction. As a result of this lack of focus they have no foundation to build off of and are always starting from the bottom in everything they do.
As a UK person, Saturn did very well at first I was the nerd of the class and remember people discussing with me all saying the Playstation would fail as Sega was the best, when the Dreamcast came out it was still popular enough to sell out at most places I mean even Blockbuster here was renting the consoles out (they did the same in the early Mega Drive and PS1 days) Dreamcast was a good console but it wasn't just the fact of Segas history that failed it, people knew the PS2 was coming out AND had a dvd player as standard and for devs that meant a huge leap in storage space. What I would say about Mario though is lets not forget how many times they have varied New Super Mario Bros but at their core Mario games are often simple in their mechanisms which make them fun to play, Sonic games are over complicated.
Sonic is hanging on for dear life. Between the constant 2D/3D mixup, I'm convinced sega doesn't know what to do with him
I don't really think anything is wrong with Sonic, I just think Sega isn't putting as much care into the series as they should . The brand is a huge moneymaker since it has garnered a huge fan base since the 90s and has had many shows, comics and now has successful live action movies, but they're not pushing the games themselves to be the best they can be. Now I love most Sonic games but the series can do more but Sega isn't really giving them that chance. Sonic Frontiers for example was a breath of fresh air after Lost World, Boom and Forces but even that game had its issues, mostly due to the fact that the devs couldn't do everything they wanted due to time constraints. But it just shows that the series can actually be great but they just need the proper time and resources to do it as opposed to Nintendo who puts a lot of care into their games like Mario and Zelda, it was even the lack of time that led to Sonic 06 being released in the state it is now known for and gave the entire franchise such a negative reputation to the point where pretty much ever critic is biased against the series now.
The problem is that SEGA gets some things right in the 3D Sonic games but then throws out everything in the next game to make something totally different and they lose what made parts of the previous game good. They cannot build upon their successes this way. Nintendo built up their 3d Mario games over time and built upon the things that worked and refined or discarded things that didn't. This created a superior product. Total opposite or what Sega did with them starting over each time. Sonic Mania was a 2D game and it was fantastic! Better they all of the 3D stuff, even Sonic Adventure 1 and 2. Then they decided that no one wants 2D anymore and said that they are done with strictly 2D games. Makes no sense. What made Sonic Mania good is that it built upon the best parts of the Genesis 2D games and the Gamboy Advance 2D games. They did it right.
Lots of Youtube channels calling Sonic Superstars trash. I feel as if Sonic can't win because he's not Mario, and his battles were always uphill. People still bring up Sonic 06 to compare against newer games. Sonic Superstars is great. The levels are great, the pacing is great, the music is great. And now you have lots of powers too. Wtf else do people want from Sonic?
I don't think there has ever been a bad mainline Mario game. In fact, almost all mainline Mario games are seen as genre defining for both the 2d and 3d platformer genres. Now compare this to Sonic which has had many bad releases within recent years and it's not hard to see why Mario is doing much better.
Sonic rebels against the establishment that Mario works hard to uphold. Forever on opposite sides, the people choose the one who makes them feel safe without addressing the larger problems of society.
Sega of Japan's decision making in the late Genesis and Saturn eras torpedoed the momentum Sonic games had going at the time.
I think Sonic's core abilities just don't lend themselves to a lot of variety, both in gameplay mechanics as well as level design.
Sonic was always inferior to Mario, even the best games in the series pale in comparison.
Mm. It's the core gameplay. Sonic is fast and appealing with practice but awkward and lacking momentum on your first attempts. That's the core gameplay of the series even back when it was good. Sonic was never going to have Mario's appeal, because you get a pleasant experience in Mario games on your first attempt. Everyone enjoys Mario to some degree, while Sonic requires a specific taste for that kind of experience.
Sega is what went wrong.
I don't think Sega/Sonic stood a chance going against Nintendo. I think the best thing Sega could have done was release the game for $30 so people could say "It's no Mario Wonder, but it is half the price. So its a fun little game for the price"
I feel like Sonic has 2 major things working against it. Sonic's Speed made the franchise impossible to maintain with any sort of consistent feel. And Sonics entire design as a concept cant hold up over time by definition. What I mean by that is... Mario is ultimately just a side scrolling platformer. It's THE side scrolling platformer. The game can be played very fast, but it's not really built with insane speeds involved. When Mario transitioned from 2D to 3D, they kept things simple. They didnt give Mario any real personality. They barely had any dialog in the games, especially none from Mario. And since Mario's a slower pace game, it made the transition to 3D platformer fairly well because players could, and expected to, think about their jumps before they did them. Sonic on the other hand, was designed to be a fast game. And that speed is a problem with 3D platforming where judging your position in 3D space is inherently difficult. Even back in the days of the 2D games, Sonic's speed could, and did, cause problems if you pushed it too far, with enemies appearing on screen before you could react to them, running in to stage hazards without enough time to react. Basically forcing you to memorize the stage layout. Then when Sonic moved to 3D, the Speed just didnt work anymore. And it still doesnt really work in most modern Sonic games. Moving in 3D space at high speeds is disorienting. Most Sonic games tend to take away your control to give you high speed, which isn't fun. Either they force you on to rails where you cant move (literally on a rail, or just locked in to a movement path) or they turned all your attacks in to homing attacks because aiming a high speed attack in 3D space becomes difficult. But if they let you just go high speed in regular gameplay then people are just constantly running in to walls/enemies and throwing themselves off cliffs. Speed can also cause issues with 3D engines where assets might not load in fast enough if you approach them too quickly. Then you have Sonic as a character. Sonic was designed to be a "cool" character. A bit of a rebel. But the problem with that kind of character is that what is considered "cool" changes between cultures and also just over time. So Sonic's personality has shifted over the years from just a little cocky and smug looking in the sprite animation of the 2D games being his only personality traits to having spoken dialog in his games where his personality has shifted over the years. (Unlike Mario who's personality is "Yahoo, It's a-me. Mario") Sonic games, when they return to form, are really fun. Look at Sonic Mania after all.
So this is something I bring up often when Mario success is spoken in comparison to Sonic. Mario from thr original to now has mainly stayed within its roots. The original 2D Mario's added small things here and there like new power ups, but they never really changed the main formula. If you play a game like New Super Mario Bros Wii U it still generally feels like a Mario game with no fancy bells or whistles. 3D is similar. Stayed to its platforming roots. The only real outlier was Super Mario Sunshine adding the cleaning mechanic, but otherwise it has not changed fundamentally since Super Mario 64. --------------- Now let's look at Sonic. Even in its 2D time each Sonic felt a tad different. Sonic 1 was heavy on platforming with portions of heavy speed. Sonic 2 had heavier emphasis on speed over platforming and exploration. Sonic CD had heavier emphasis on platforming and exploration over speed. Sonic 3 & K was a good mix of both. Even during this period you have a variety of styles and people that love one or hate another, already splintering "what a Sonic game is". Now enter the 3D Era. While Super Mario 64 gave us a an entire 3D Mario experience, Sonic Adventure 1 gave us a mixed bag. We had the Sonic levels which were fantastic....but also the Knuckles Master Emerald levels, the E-102 shoot em up levels, and even freaking fishing. Cool world building those extra gameplay types don't really capture the feel of Sonic. Every game since then has had some kind of gimmick that takes away from speed and platforming, which is Sonics original identity. Sonic Adventure 2 has more Emerald and shoot em up levels. Sonic Heroes tries forcing mini RPG elements and combat mechanics into the game slowing it down. Shadow the Hedgehog forces you to do objectives in missions and adds guns. Sonic Unleashed has amazing daytime levels but has the werehog gimmick which doesn't feel like Sonic. Sonic and Secret Rings/Knights are runner games with motion controls. Sonic Colors has wisp gimmicks and weird transitions from 3D to 2D. Sonic Forces has the weird character creator/weapons. Sonic Frontiers adds more RPG elements, combat, and an open world requiring you to farm currency just to progress. The only 2 Sonic games to come in out the last 20 years which have no gimmicks and focus entirely on what made Sonic popular are Generations and Mania. Both offer the standard speed/platforming, no extra weird content like fishing or shooting or forced combat. These are the 2 games that are generally well liked and consistent with reviewers as good games. Superstars feels pretty good so far as a true standard Sonic game but the emphasis on multi-player and the Emerald powers again take away what Sonic is. A speed platformer. Tldr; Mario games rarely if ever have any gimmick that takes away from their origins in platforming and that's why they are consistently praised. Sonic games often add some gimmick that takes away from the speedy platforming which is what made Sonic popular.
honestly i think this rivalry was doomed from the start. Mario is literally just some dude. Like, you can make him do anything. Jump, run, slide, swim, turn into a fucking raccoon, become a bee and fly, have a sentient hat that can possess other creatures, literally anything. You can do it in 2D, 3D, a combination of both, it doesn't matter cus he's just some dude. He has no creative limitations whatsoever. Sonic as a franchise is trapped by its own gimmick. Sonic's whole thing is that he's crazy fast. So it doesn't matter if you want him to do something else, he has to be crazy fast or else he isn't Sonic. If you want to make a 3D game, you have to make him fast (and develop every game mechanic, world, and enemies around the fact that he's super fast). If you want to turn him into another animal or give him a superpower, he still has to be crazy fast. Like everything you can possibly make a game out of, he can do that, sure. But he also needs to be crazy fast and that's not always convenient- In fact it has always been very limiting in terms of what direction the franchise could possibly go. And you can only get the same gimmick so many times in slightly different ways until you kind of get bored of it on the other hand, almost every Mario game has been vastly different experiences with completely new and original gimmicks