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Aw man, I remember being really pumped for this game, and even enjoying it to a certain degree when I actually played it. Then again as a lifelong Sonic fan who'd just watched literally his first favorite anything hit absolute rock bottom I probably would have taken anything that was an improvement over that and said "gently caress yes this rules". That said, I was trying to replay it a little while ago and I just couldn't bring myself to slog through it again. SuccinctAndPunchy posted:Weirder still is the way one of the comics wrote around this slight timeline gently caress-up. Amy just apparently finds some weird magical plot-fixing artifact thing and uses it to magically age herself upwards because I forget the reason why. Said magical age-up also apparently giving her a completely new wardrobe. You know, because character redesigns. There was a gag where the school system still counts her as a second-grader because her birth certificate and medical records and poo poo still say "eight years old". Only good thing to really come out of that particular plot decision, I feel... Really, the new writers ever since the comics suddenly got good have done an admirable job trying to either write out the Penders-era bullshit or retcon it into something that's halfway not lovely.
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Sep 14, 2013 10:52
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TheFattestPat posted:I've heard theories that Eggman builds casinos and amusement parks in order to get a cash flow. I'm not really sure why'd he'd need money though. Other than for building his initial robot army, of course. I've heard the same thing; actually I think it might even have been in one of the early game manuals... Hobgoblin2099 posted:I'm not sure how canon Sonic Battle is, but he seems to get his income from selling his robots as security drones to places that need it. I always took it as sort of a cruel irony thing. Like, he's trying to enslave the entire world, and he doesn't appear to be aware of the concept of "bread and circuses", so he must necessarily crush out pleasure and happiness. Then, because he appears to get his jollies by making other people miserable, he makes his central base of operations a large, colorful complex with no useful purpose but Having Fun, as a constant reminder to the subjugated populace of what he took away from them.
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Sep 16, 2013 07:35
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There's an old-ish Tumblr post or something kicking around about how Rouge is basically the Sonic franchise's (and, to a lesser extent, gaming in general's) biggest wasted potential. The Cliff's Notes version is that Sonic Team took a comedy prompt (a three-foot femme fatale who steals everything that isn't nailed down, is obsessed with jewels, and will not be stopped) and said, "Instead of doing something funny, let's see how many awkward furry boners we can get going." Personally if it were up to me they'd reboot the whole franchise, and they could only keep, say, four or five characters besides the core trio, if they can successfully argue that they can do something actually funny with them (Rouge gets a by on the vetting process, because if they did her properly she'd be the best character in the franchise, but naturally that comes with the stipulation that they actually do her properly). Seriously everything they have ever come up with has been something that, deep down, really needed to be funny. I have no idea what possessed them to go all Tails Gets Trolled. Dr. Buttass fucked around with this message at 03:21 on Sep 23, 2013 |
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Sep 23, 2013 03:18
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Wind God Sety posted:Isn't that more or less what they've done post-Sonic 2006? Mostly, yeah. They're headed in the right direction but they still have this big glut of useless characters they need to do away with. Relegating them to cameos in Generations was another step in the right direction but it's still a sign that they're hanging onto them in case they have another dumb idea. Basically, the part of me that's been a fan of this series since he was a tiny child is hopping up and down in a spergy, entitled rage, demanding that they prune the hell out of this tree. I wanna say they should ditch all but two or three non-core characters but they seem to be trying pretty hard to make Shadow and Rouge part of the core cast, so I'm not really sure where to put them when I make that statement. Lizard Wizard posted:Also hilarious, yes. That is motherfucking excellent. Who drew that? Why aren't they working for Sonic Team right loving now?
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Sep 25, 2013 02:14
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Cheez posted:They were actual useful characters. The ones they added later were not, and most of them only got talking roles. The rest were either clones or were given gameplay mechanics that didn't make them worth playing. Also they were forced upon you. Yeah but what about the Sonic characters?
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Sep 25, 2013 03:48
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Artix posted:Yep, and to their credit, Crisis City is probably not only the best level in 06 (not exactly saying much), but one of the best levels in Generations, so hey, it worked out for the better. I actually thought it was one of the worst levels in Generations, myself. What's so great about it?
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Sep 25, 2013 20:59
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Hobgoblin2099 posted:They were in the DS version of Colors, and some have shown up in side games, too. Mostly. He's used to introduce a new field ability, but after that he has even less plot relevance than the optional characters.
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Sep 29, 2013 07:05
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I think Big's main problem is that he's basically a combination of traits other characters have, but he doesn't bring anything new to the table or combine them in an interesting way. If they want anything he has to offer they can just trot out Blaze if they need a cat or someone purple, Knuckles if they want super strength, and Silver if they need someone's whose IQ is below room temperature.Lizard Wizard posted:Don't be so sure! We never got any wonky translation with him. Goddammit.
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Sep 29, 2013 21:19
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Electric Phantasm posted:But can any of them fish? Silver again. Remember Psychonauts?
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Sep 29, 2013 23:36
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Lizard Wizard posted:Isn't the defining version of Blaze's dimension basically "We have Robotnik, but worse"? Also, instead of some kind of nebulously defined "chaos" energy, their ultimate power comes from fire.
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Oct 1, 2013 03:41
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Speaking of Sonic cartoon shows, this is apparently a thing. Knuckles been hittin' the gym.
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Oct 2, 2013 21:37
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Dolash posted:He's still got the prominent knuckles on his... well, knuckles, though, as well as the right kind of tail. Not to mention it's a shot with Sonic, Amy and Tails, he rounds out the cast of "Main" Sonic & Friends characters. You don't know that man. He could be Crash the Tasmanian Devil. The part of me that's loved Sonic since he was a tiny idiot child wants this to be really good and do well, but the part that's grown into a large and mean-spirited adult would have just as much fun if it was a train wreck.
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Oct 3, 2013 05:48
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No way you guys. Some of the details are a little different. It has to be a completely unfamiliar character entirely or everything we've ever believed in is a lie.
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Oct 3, 2013 12:38
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How about Government Connections. She gets indictments to force enemies to punch less hard, and intimidating men in black to drive down shop prices.
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Oct 9, 2013 05:35
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I've always just kind of figured that past the point where he literally broke the Master Emerald himself to keep it out of the wrong hands, Knuckles just kind of said, "gently caress it! I'm done! poo poo ain't workin'!" So now he just kind of treats his job less like he's the Master Emerald's nanny and more like he's its truancy officer, because, I mean, it's gonna get stolen anyway, so if he just stops caring until it's being actively stolen, he can go have some fun in his life. This is why he has time to go perform in the Olympics, or go kart racing, or participate in the plot of whatever the gently caress game he wants.SonicRulez posted:Also, that was a very very interesting dynamic they glossed over. Sonic kinda left his friends high and dry for some time, so leadership passed to Knuckles. This is another one of those "Rouge the Bat" things where they took an idea with shitloads of potential and just hosed it right up. See, he's not saying, "I'm in charge now." He's saying, "We all figured out how to be independent and get poo poo done on our own," because that's exactly what happened (Amy aside). Tails said he had to do some growing up since he couldn't rely on Sonic anymore; so he wasn't relying on Knuckles, he was learning to rely on himself. Knuckles didn't have Sonic hanging around telling him, "We can't just punch poo poo randomly until the problem gets solved, we need to punch something specific," so he had to learn that kind of restraint on his own. The further out you go from the core cast the more independent they were to begin with but they still rallied behind Sonic when a problem needed solving. So now, Sonic's kind of an outsider in his own team. Everyone's learned to function without him and they work together all the more effectively for it, because they have a better understanding of each others' strengths and weaknesses both as they were and as they are now, and Sonic's behind the game on all of that, and he has to learn how to work with his friends all over again, this time as a group of equals who work together because they understand one another and can play off each others' strengths, instead of as a bunch of people who are working together because they all follow the same leader. Except they didn't do any of that, they just kind of pooped out a script in a couple of weeks. Amy seems to have gone up the pole instead; whether she was convinced Sonic would be back soon and she's been sitting on this Boyfriend In Canada thing for however many months or years Sonic was gone, or she's legitimately insane and really believes in her fake boyfriend, her coping mechanism was to craft a fiction she was fairly certain would make Sonic jealous and capture his interest in a way more overt advances had failed to. This, too, could have been much more interesting than they made it, especially if they had portrayed it as unhealthy no matter how the player has Sonic treat Amy.
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Oct 23, 2013 23:18
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NeoAnjou posted:Dexter is the bonus boss - if you piss Amy off enough in game then he appears as post-game content Yeah, but he's broken, you can't beat him legit. He wipes your face right off unless you use this really obscure item called "antipsychotics" that makes you auto-win the fight.
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Oct 25, 2013 00:44
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Give us Knuckles and Big. Team Sonic, and also the funny guy!
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Oct 26, 2013 02:24
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majormonotone posted:Sonic Adventure, actually. If you wanna get really technical, it's been since Sonic CD, when some obscure version of the manual holds that a tarot reading told her she and Sonic would be 2Getha4Eva and she's been chasing him ever since, convinced that if she's persistent enough he'll succumb and love her because that kind of behavior totally isn't creepy and immoral when guys do it.
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Nov 1, 2013 00:59
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And now, another installment of stupid character design talk no one asked for with Dr. Buttass. Found this dude with a deviantart fulla rad redesigns of Sonic characters. Point of note: They tried to give Amy a personality beyond "wants to gently caress Sonic, no matter what his opinion is".TwoPair posted:But hey, if it weren't for their useless robots, Sonic wouldn't be able to chain homing attacks to cross long gaps! GUN: Saving the day through incompetence. Hey, be fair now, they're a government agency. They're doing the best they can. It's not like they can hire a privately funded mercenary compaOH WAIT THEY CAN it's called "Sonic's bailed your rear end out so many times it's a full time job now".
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Nov 7, 2013 01:40
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Sonic canon is like Zelda canon. If anything contradicts anything else, it was an alternate timeline.
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Nov 14, 2013 02:12
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LeafyOrb posted:This line of talk only leads towards pain and fanfics. ALTERNATE. TIMELINE.
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Nov 14, 2013 05:34
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ElPottoGrande posted:
This is kind of loving surreal man. I guess when you heard the deal about Shade you understood why you had to take out Julie-Su though.
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Nov 22, 2013 01:58
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about Sonic comics
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Give us B. Suffer for our amusement. No but seriously I wanna hear/read your thoughts on all this.
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Dec 15, 2013 12:32
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Onmi posted:I'm sorry but even if you "Polished" this, the game is still a turd. The combat is unfun, the quests are boring, the game is slow and poorly controlled, and the story... well being better than your source material doesn't make it good. Actually Big the Cat is one of the things pretty much everyone agrees Bioware improved, by making him entirely out of character. He's still a moron, but now he's funny about it.
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Jan 1, 2014 10:57
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Onmi posted:You literally just contradicted yourself. "Funny Moron" is not completely out of character for "Moron". It's the exact same character, because Big the Cats single definition is "I don't give a gently caress about anything but my frog" That is the one trait that defines Big, he will go through hell and high water for his loving frog and he cares jack poo poo about everything else. Yeah but he wasn't funny before. Being funny is new. And out of character. Yapping Eevee posted:Calling it now: If we have playable Eggman, he's going to need Tails for at least one of his moves (because that's blindingly obvious). Yeah he does. That's not even a spoiler. It's that blindingly obvious because it happens. quote:I know next to nothing about the Sonic franchise in general, so all this in/out-of-character talk is beyond me. They're not exactly "in-character", but it's not really entirely Bioware's fault. They had a DIMPS-level time frame to make the game, they weren't very familiar with the characters, and the franchise isn't exactly known for grade-A writing to begin with (remember the discussion earlier in the thread about Rouge?). I think given more time, and access to whoever it was that would later do the writing for Colors and Generations, this game could have actually had really good writing if nothing else. Onmi seems to have some kind of beef with Bioware set apart from anything related to this game, so I'd take his opinion with a grain of salt. Dr. Buttass fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Jan 2, 2014 |
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Jan 1, 2014 23:50
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ElPottoGrande posted:I don't recall, honestly. And I'd hesitate to confirm anything because everything pre-Generations was notorious for leaks, and I don't want anything pointing to me. Mainly what it makes me wonder is, what the hell happened? I haven't had a chance to play Lost World yet but I'm told it fell into the same "candy-colored animals having deep grimdark serious problems" trap that made '06 such an unbearable piece of poo poo. Those guys were doing a great job with Colors and Generations (especially for not having a series bible. Or maybe because of it), who looked at the work they did on those games and the fan response and went, "Not good enough! F minus minus! Try again when you can make the HR director hate himself"?
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Jan 2, 2014 11:41
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Onmi posted:No. Not at all. How could you ever look at Lost World and think it's anything like 06? you would have to have a problem with their being a plot at all to be pissed off at Lost Worlds plot. You are just a tiny ball of unrestrained, self-important rage, aren't you?
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Jan 2, 2014 12:57
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Chuu posted:Sonic '06 is such a legendary trainwreck that I tried to slog through the famous VLP. I got to the end of sonic, and then noticed I was 1/3 of the way through and now they were basically replaying the levels as other characters. I couldn't take it anymore and just stopped watching. Is there some payoff to slog through the rest? Should I just skip to the end? Mainly the payoff is listening to pokecapn and them go completely up the pole. Medibot was the only one that got any sleep during the whole thing so they just all completely loving lose their minds as they lose track of what weird bullshit is the game legitimately loving up and what's them hallucinating because it's been like two days since they got any sleep. I mean it's a little hard to tell with medibot but the rest of them just sort of call in sick from reality after a while.
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Jan 3, 2014 01:18
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Kurieg posted:Silver's Pyramid level is great because they are so bad at billiards. Medibot's reaction to finishing that section is without question the LP's peak.
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Jan 3, 2014 05:31
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Astro Nut posted:Pretty much this is both the boon and and curse of the Sonic franchise. For better or for worse, Sega and its affiliates are always experimenting, always trying to find new ways to play. Sometimes it works, sometimes it really doesn't. This is something I've said about Double Fine, so I've been trying to decide why I'm willing to forgive them their failures when I'm very flagrantly not willing to give Sega and whoever they contract out to (since it's not always Sonic Team) a by on their heinous flops, but I think I've figured it out: deliberateness. Like, Double Fine's experiments are always clearly experiments, it's evident they're trying something new, they're gonna see where it goes. And they're gonna make sure it's as polished as possible, with solid writing and art direction and as few bugs as possible, so that even if whatever they're experimenting with doesn't work out, the game still has something to recommend. A Double Fine experiment gives the impression that they wanted to make something really great and everyone got behind that goal and did the best drat job they could. A Sega experiment...doesn't, always. Sometimes it seems more like the so-called experiment was more of a cynical cash-grab put together after a meeting with a focus group *significantcoughShadowtheHedgehog*. Or, even when it isn't, it doesn't have the same "everyone really believes in this and wants it to be the best it can be" feeling you get from Double Fine games. When a Sonic experiment doesn't work, it feels really half-assed a lot of the time, either because the people making it didn't want to be and stayed late at work under duress if at all, or because it was rushed the hell out the door before it was ready, or both.
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Jan 4, 2014 07:24
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Give us Cream, Eggman, and the Fighting Freak, Knuckles.Astro Nut posted:...Man, I get Tails is (sometimes) meant to be eight years old, but getting an actual eight year old to do the voice work? I don't get this weird age-down thing they did with some of the characters. Tails used to be like fourteen or something, and Charmy was, what, sixteen? Now they're eight and six respectively. First off I think it's a little strange that Sonic has enough in common with a kid half his age to spend so much time hanging out with him. But what really baffles me is Charmy. Isn't Vector like twenty? There's definitely not enough in common there. Are Charmy's parents negligent and Team Chaotix is really just Espio and Vector, but they're paid to babysit Charmy 24/7 while they do their other jobs? Does Charmy just hang around unbidden, and they've learned to exploit his talents for their own gain since they can't get rid of him? Are Vector and Espio his adopted gay dads, making them the negligent parents since they drag him along on dangerous criminal investigations? Is the Obvious Joke the Actual Answer? These are the important questions.
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Jan 5, 2014 01:09
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Gensuki posted:Do you really want to get into Sonic canon? Because we can take this out behind the Wal-Mart. Yeah let's do this, son. School's in session and the teacher is not nearly as hot as I hoped. (tell me it's the irresponsible gay dads one. Just tell me it's the irresponsible gay dads one)
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Jan 5, 2014 02:10
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majormonotone posted:The next character we get obsoletes Rouge's only use (it's not stealing). No, we already have Tails. We don't need anyone else to obsolete Rouge.
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Jan 5, 2014 08:54
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Gensuki posted:The secret is pokecapn had been playing for basically 20 hours straight, and was thus tired and pissed off. It's actually all not as hard as it looks. Don't get me wrong it's not good or fun at all, but it's certainly not a 2 hour stage. There's one spot during the Tails section that must have killed him if/when he ever noticed it after the fact; one of those eagle statues that makes the time dimensions go away appears for just the briefest moment right on the edge of the screen, every time he has to redo that section, and every time he has to redo that section, he completely overlooks it. It probably made his life just so much harder and was a pretty big reason why he did have to redo it so much.
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Jan 5, 2014 12:10
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Bogart posted:No, my friend. Big Cream Egg. My family and I do not buy enough of these at Easter.
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Jan 8, 2014 07:13
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Gensuki posted:Every sonic character is actually probably great, it's just the writing/story gets in the way of that. Yeah that rant I went on about Rouge earlier in the thread definitely applies to pretty much the entire cast. The Sonic universe is populated with characters who have enormous potential to be ridiculous and fun and silly, and people keep trying to put them in games and poo poo with these super serious stories that would barely work even if the characters weren't candy-colored wildlife. Shinjobi posted:It's kinda funny, really; there have been times where the Sonic comics have been criticized as being a convoluted mess that got way out of hand. Those days are a memory now, for the most part. With the current staff in charge of the comics, I'd take a thousand issues of either Sonic or Sonic Universe before I tried Sonic Chronicles again. Ken Penders straight up ran that poo poo into the ground, and the game is rapidly approaching a point where Bioware went "gently caress it, we have a deadline to make" and starting ripping off huge chunks of plot points from the comics in lieu of doing any writing themselves. It shows. Even accounting for what the writing's been like so far, it really shows. I believe Archie's current strategy is "burn it to the ground and start anew".
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Feb 7, 2014 00:53
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Ometeotl posted:I think Knuckles swallowed the Master Emerald in a last ditch effort to protect it from yet another inevitable hoisting/shattering. That makes a little too much sense. I mean he has kind of spent the last few games not really taking the job seriously.
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Feb 7, 2014 03:04
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SGR posted:I know this is a bit off-topic now, but I am very looking forward to how insane this man's "contributions" were. Unless there's one I haven't heard before, the absolute best story involves echidnas, so we're going to have to wait on that one.
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Feb 9, 2014 10:01
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Onmi posted:Hell the entire plot of the game being "Sonic went off for a while and gently caress Him we had to grow up without him" is really weird since... well... Sonic doesn't have a place of residence. In almost every game he's been in Sonic does not have a "Home" even in Sonic Adventure 1 where everyone else had a home of some sort Sonic had a hotel room. He does not live anywhere, he does whatever he drat well pleases and goes where ever he drat well pleases. Well I donno I mean, look at it like this. We almost literally never see the other characters without Sonic. Even the ones that technically actually have their own agendas, like Shadow, or Blaze, or Knuckles, seem to cross paths with him a whole lot while they're going about their business. On the one hand this makes sense because the series is "Sonic the Hedgehog," not "A Bunch of Random, Brightly-Colored Assholes". On the other hand, this also makes it look like either everyone else's life revolves around Sonic, and they follow him on his free-spirited wanderings because they have no idea what to do with themselves, which also makes them handy in case Sonic stumbles upon some world-saving that needs doing; or else the world doesn't need to be saved nearly as often as we think it does, and Sonic is actually super needy and restricts his free-spirited wandering to the immediate vicinity of wherever his friends have set up shop in case some world-saving stumbles upon them. On the third hand, I'm sure Sonic is just as big a fan of sleeping under a roof during a thunderstorm as you or me.
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Feb 10, 2014 10:12
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The comics were inventing metric shittons of unnecessary characters before it was cool. Sonic has dated a bunch of them but literally all romantical and relationshipical tension is dead because we all know he's gonna hook up with Sally in the end. And just in case you're one of those weirdoes who doubts obvious things like the wetness of water, they've done a bunch of Xty Years Later storylines and Sonic is married to Sally in all of them. Except for the one where weird time shenanigans turned Sonic into a depressed hobo, and Shadow married Sally instead because reasons. At the end of which Sally divorced Shadow and married Sonic.
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Feb 10, 2014 22:52
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