Sonic is the only 90s mascot who's still around. He's survived the death of his consoles, the turmoil within his company, several high profile video game disasters, and even several years of bad comics.
25 years later, the character has a comic that's pushed past 276 issues to become the longest licensed American comic in history, with a spin-off book that's also pushed past 75 issues. He's got a television series that's been renewed for a second season. He's going to star in at least TWO video games this year, if not more.
At least when something like the Transformers franchise, or the Star Wars franchise, has a critical disaster, it manages to makes ungodly amounts of money. I think Sonic 06 managed to push...what, one million copies worldwide, on two platforms, early in the HD era when the tech was still in development and costs were skyrocketing?
If Sonic isn't the most resilient character (and franchise) in history, he's certainly up there, because the fact that the character has managed to continue to be a multimedia franchise despite some of the crap that's been dished out is insane. Even something as insignificant as the comic book series was able to survive at least 5 years (or more, depending on how you look at it) years of terrible writing. Licensed comic books are incredibly lucky to last HALF this long. For the record, the comic has slowly gone on to become one of the best reads in all ages comics since the current creative team took over back in 2006.
Of course, I think that this speaks volumes to just how strong those early video game efforts were. The Genesis quadrilogy has been ported to countless platforms for very good reason. Let's also not forget that the character has starred in some great handheld efforts over the years, not to mention console games like Sonic Colors and Sonic Generations. And love them or hate them, the Adventure series also garners strong positive memories for a millions of gamers, and were the first Sonic games for many.
| AZWification said: The problem with Sonic is consistency. We've seen with Colors and Generations that Sonic Team is capable of making good games, but then Lost World happened. |
Eh, even Lost World wasn't all that bad. I think it probably has some of the strongest 3D stages in the series.
IMO, the game's problem kinda encapsulates Sonic Team as a whole: it's incredibly inconsistent. In a desperate attempt to load it with content, NOTHING was left on the cutting room floor. My God, one stages was literally just pressing a button to fly between spike balls in an otherwise featureless level. The game had some interesting ideas (parkour, cylindrical levesl that gave players 3 or 4 different ways to move through a single part of a stage) but the level design often failed to utilize them. The game also broke on cardinal rule for Sonic games: simple conveyance of game mechanics to players. As annoying as characters like Tikal and Omochao can be, having a voice TELL YOU what to do rather than easily misseable text would have certainly been helpful. -.-
