I dunno if I would call it resilient, but rather Sonic being on life support, haha...

Poor guy's been forced into some rather crappy games for some time now, the last 'good' ones being the Sonic Adventure games. Colors and Generations may be good, but those are far and few in between.

I still believe there can be a good sonic game and still believe in him myself. I've loved the guy since I was a kid and still do. I also think Sonic can come back because it would actually be quite easy to do so, but Sega refuses to take the simple route and look back on what made Sonic great in the first place: Running fast and great platforming. They basically figured out the formula in Sonic Adventure on how to make a good 3D Sonic game, and it confuses me as to why they don't do more games like it. They always feel the need to add weird gimmicks, like guns, God of War gameplay, and a sword. Just.. make him run. Let everyone run. Let me be Super Sonic, Hyper Knuckles, and even Super Tails. Heck, I'll even take Super Amy... T_T;

Despite all the bad games, I still believe. One of these days they're going to get it right, and it's going to be great.

...hopefully.

Yeah, he is super resiliant. Surviving Sonic and the Black Knight would be impossible for any other video game mascot. Could you imagine Mario and the Black Knight?

Considering how bad his games originally were I'd probably agree with you, despite mediocre games from the get go he's still going. A huge component of his fame is due to mario and the console wars though. Let's face it smash bros brawl was probably the most exposure he had ever received.
And yes I'm aware that the viewpoint that the old sonic games were bad is not a common one. I also think that sonic adventure 2 is his best game so there's probably something wrong with me lol

Those newer sonics look awful only the 91 actually looks like a good character design.

Still love Sonic 1991.

Haha yeah, probably should have chucked that one in the unpopular opinions thread. Don't get me wrong ive enjoyed some sonic games. Plenty of them have been good enough. But imo he's yet to have a masterpiece worthy of such longevity and legacy 

I mean the Sonic IP is obviously very recogonizable and we all like Sonic, but his character brand is maybe 1/10 as valuable as Mario. just saying. Not nearly as resilient or powerful as Mario in terms of market relevance, and this is coming from someone who likes Sonic games generally speaking

he is definitely one of the most recognizable characters though. the problem is that there haven't been many good Sonic games in a while- his relevance is definitely dramatically less than what it was 10 years ago. Also in terms of sales no Sonic game has ever breached 5 million and in the recent years many of his titles have failed to even break 1 million :/ just saying

I think it says a lot that the best selling 'Sonic' game ever is the "Mario - Sonic Olympics" Wii game. one could argue that competing against Mario (and therefore the Mario connection) is a big part of Sonic's relevance

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.

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. -.-

but arguably Sonic has become a running joke

his original games aren't even THAT good, maybe Sonic 3 is solid but the first 2 are ehhh. I actually enjoy plenty of Sonic titles, the Genesis titles despite their flaws, Sonic Adventure series, Sonic DX- but to act as if the Sonic fanbase is what it was 10 years ago is nuts. sales would show that but they don't. solo Sonic games are not doing better now than they used to. I suppose you could debate that that could be from the games being crap but I don't think that is fully the reason

actually its a pretty common opinion that the first two Sonic games were ehhhh haha.  Sonic 3 was good though.

Sonic Adventure 2 IS the best Sonic game, your opinons are pretty much the universally agreed upon ones haha.

the reality is Sonic has never been a super acclaimed series in terms of critics, it just has a strongish fanbase who love the blue guy and the universe