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Some of you might have guessed it, but this has been on my mind for quite a while now. Once there was a time that most of us were convinced that Sega didn't know what a Sonic game was anymore. Now? Even we don't seem to be so confident of it these days, and considering how explorative and vocal we as a fanbase are, I think that says a lot. So I thought I'd take a day to refocus all that, to get back down to the core of what makes Sonic Sonic from a gameplay standpoint, and explore the mistakes that let things come to this.

REINVENTING THE SPINBALL

Let's start at where we are now. Lost World changed up the Sonic formula by embedding parkour in everything Sonic does, and Sonic Boom... well, Sonic Boom not even outwardly claims to have anything to do with the franchise it's based off, beyond that they're using its name to sell. Two brand new gameplay styles. How many does that make now? Well, assuming you're generous enough to count the classic engines and Dimps mockeries under a single leaf, shove together the Rush and Unleashed eras on account of the boost, and forget the spinoffs that don't have any kind of canonical implications on or in other games, that makes ... by my approximation, six or seven. Alright, fair enough, it's not unheard of. So which one of these is the primary one...? Huh? What do you mean there isn't one?


Even the most focused game of the generation still needed two fucking playstyles for some reason

That right there is our first problem - Sega doesn't identify their mascot with a single gameplay style at all, choosing instead to use him as a vehicle for other things they can't sell on their own. Even if they do a good job of it, it means all progress inevitably comes at the cost of other progress, and no lessons are learned from mistakes commited previously - at least not enough of them that a single style ever reaches anywhere near its potential peak. Besides that point, it also clouds the identity of the brand by not anchoring him firmly enough to a specific style of play and building everything else off of that, like just about any other franchise that survives for over two decades - and just like they themselves used to in the earliest days, but I'll get to that later. The point is that the biggest problem here is actually by far the simplest to solve - keep the damned games consistent, and an identity will form around it. Scatter their focus like they have been lately, and nobody will have a concrete idea what they're actually playing these games for, beyond a face and a name - because as it stands now it's certaintly not for an assurance of quality.

Now I can already tell someone's going to pipe up and ask "well won't it get boring if we're playing the same games over and over"? That's not what I fucking said at all, and that happens to be my next point:

SONIC AND THE POINTLESS, UNORIGINAL AND GLITCHY GIMMICK

Okay, yes, that wasn't entirely fair. I just wanted an excuse to reference Hejibits. But you can see where I'm going from this - I have no idea what possessed Sega to believe they couldn't make Sonic sell based off his own damned merits, but somehow that became a thing not long after 3D started catching on and for some reason they've almost never looked back since. Besides the fact that these gimmicks just cloud brand identity more when they're literally all that's to Sonic games these days, they don't even fucking work from a critical or a monetary standpoint - the fact that Sonic's become a joke in the eyes of the public largely because of them is a testament to as much.


A gimmick these aren't, on the other hand.

However, it's important to establish what a gimmick is, at least in regards to this discussion - because believe it or not, making a Sonic game that's not just a level pack of the previous game doesn't mean going to the exact opposite end of the scale and adding shit that doesn't blend with the gameplay just for the sake of it. Though it seems cliche'd as all hell to give a Mario example - Galaxy introduced planetoid gravity as a quirk to separate it from previous games, but quite contrary to how Sonic games handle quirks like this, it doesn't disrupt any of the existing gameplay - combined with brilliant learning curve design, it works hand in hand with everything Mario could already do prior, enhancing the experience without changing it at its core. That's the most important distinction here - a quirk cooperates with the existing gameplay to ehnance it, while a gimmick demands the existing gameplay bend over backwards to support it, usually abandoning or disrupting it as a result.

On another relevant footnote, while this probably goes without saying to most of you I feel it still needs to be said - a choice of characters should not fucking equate to a choice of completely different fucking games, and Sega needs to stop believing that the two are in any way even remotely related. Give them a handful of different moves if you must, but they all should ultimately draw from the same gameplay, work towards the same level goals, experience the same levels and accomplish all the same major feats. A character choice is just an excuse to play the same game in a slightly but notably different way - this isn't god damned rocket science.

LEVEL GIMMICK: THE GAME

Another extremely annoying misconception I see on the subject of Sonic a lot is that quirk or gimmick alike, it absolutely has to be applied on a game-wide basis, which is complete bullshit. What a lot of people forget is that levels, and sometimes by extension their tropes, used to encapsulate all this shit by themselves, and regardless of the outcome were always better off for it - if it worked and it was fun, great, you had another reason to believe the stage was memorable. If not, it didn't overstay its welcome, allowing you to move on and explore what surprises the next stage had for you. Can you even imagine making an entire game based around Marble Garden's spintop? Or Death Egg's reversible gravity? Or the water level changes in Aquatic Mine? Or the Quick Step sections in Spagonia?


Ooooooooh, right. That last one actually happened.

It sounds fucking stupid, doesn't it? Well, that's the position we're in right now - Sega makes quirks that could easily be level gimmicks, and makes them game gimmicks instead. You could easily have made parts in Colours, for example, where level elements turned you into a laser or let you stick to walls unaided or toggle binary on/off fading blocks, and it would have worked to the benefit of the flow of the level, helped ease any repetition and laser focus (if you'll pardon the unintentional pun) these traits exactly where they're needed in the environment. Because honestly, these things gel better with the levels than they do with Sonic's own gameplay at its core. And complete gameplay changes like the Werehog and Caliburn aside, so does almost everything else. Stick to a central gameplay style, use the levels and the levels alone to experiment otherwise, that's the lesson here.

And as one last personal pet peeve: no, "it's a spinoff" is not a fucking excuse for anything, because the moment you have to defend the fact that a Sonic game isn't a Sonic game because it isn't even trying to be a Sonic game, it only begs the question of why it stars that fucking blue hedgehog in the first place.

BACK TO YOUR ROOTS

Let's go even further back, into the relative youth of the series. If the later games in the series distort the very meaning of what it is to be Sonic, what was Sonic before this actually happened? First of all, I'm just going to say this straight - the classics may be held on a high pedestal almost unanimously, but I don't personally believe they are to be upheld as a word of law, particularly when most of the things that make it tick just don't translate into most third dimensional situations. So in much the same way that The Linear RPG boils down the formula all the way to its base components, I think there's a lot to learn by observing the individual mechanics that makes classic Sonic work, and how other styles can benefit from it.



One of the most heavily discussed of these is that while Sonic is fast, his speed doesn't come cheap - it is only through cooperation with the level design and its quirks that he is at his most mobile. And being constantly toted as the fastest thing alive, you could say that finishing levels in the fastest means possible is one of the most heavily implied self-imposed goals of the games (I guess you could even say a somewhat forced sense of pride, even?), and mobility is the greatest stepping stone towards that. Another less discussed facet is that there's more to the level itself than simply running from point A to B - at any given time it was never surprising to see pathways fork like a trident, and each being treated as a wholly different focus rather than just an alternate route to the goal. Routes with simpler platforming, more rings and/or enemies, Special Stages, secret rooms, it goes on... the point is that there was more to it than just finishing a level quickly, and that in of itself was reason enough to play a game more than once. And even if it wasn't, the alternative is that it had a little something for everyone, which was just as noble.

Today, one of these has been outright abandoned, and the other only half fulfilled. Speed is treated as a constant - either it's on, or it's off, almost nothing helps or hinders you and almost nothing carries over unless you're telling it to (and even then you're bound to see speed drops for literally no reason, sometimes for something as simple as jumping). Alternate routes exist in a way, but it's not usually much more than one, and not usually anything more than a shortcut to the goal (to say nothing of the unintentional ones that literally break the game). Alternate goals, self-imposed or otherwise, virtually don't exist, and when they do are usually reduced to frustrating collect-a-thons that break the pace and flow of the level.

How differently would game today be if they took the example of games of old, if not their style? I can think of a handful. For one, the most obvious, slopes would probably be important again in some way, but even if not slopes there would be something to exploit to make the most of Sonic's momentum, even if it were something silly like grinding on objects during the boost sections of Riders: 0G. The boost itself, if it ever existed, would affect acceleration rate rather than fix it to a static speed, perhaps increasing your speed cap, and would be affected by the environment around you. Parkour in Lost World would probably be something as simple as jumping into a wall at an angle and keeping whatever momentum you had prior.

Any one of those could work, but I absolutely have to stress only one, because:

JUST PICK AN APPROACH AND FUCKING STICK WITH IT FOR ONCE

When Boom rolled around, Sega tried to assure me this wasn't a bad thing because traditional Sonic games would still be made... is it just me or is this a really crap compromise for all sides involved? On the part of the publisher, this means you're responsible for two entire continuities at once and trying desperately to make them coexist when they drain on each other's revenue. On the part of us fans it strikes another divide in the audience, when said audience is already polluted with divides like these, like cracks in a pane of glass liable to shatter when we least expect it - because changes in gameplay tend to be given equal importance and exposure, very few people can actually agree which one Sonic identifies with the strongest, and are constantly alienated by a new generation of games that completely neglect everything theirs stood for.

But perhaps most importantly of all, on the part of the audience in general, outsiders who aren't so fanatical about the franchise that they'd have a minature pool of plushies to swim in and collect the games regardless of quality like we do... they're just going to end up confused and disoriented, and rightfully so because they're being sent conflicting messages from every source of information around them. Sega's not about to own up to one being more worthy of your money than the other after how much they dropped on it, the fanbase is liable to stab you in the throat with a broken bottle if you so much as hint as not aligning with their own preferences, and critics, let's face it, are going to tell you to avoid it irregardless of how they turn out. How many of these problems could be fixed by essentially making two similar games and staying that way? Basically fuckin' all of them, as far as I can imagine.


You can't get away this time! There's only one real Sonic!

There is really no amount of emphasis I can say this with that will be wholly appropriate. As he stands right now, Sonic has been dug into a hole by constant gimmicks and reinventions, and has been backed into a dire identity crisis as a result. Sega's solution to this seems to be to... keep doing the exact same thing that got him there to start with? To keep reinventing his gameplay until something sticks by pure chance? Even if it ever worked, which it isn't, it would still be fucking stupid because it serves as a DmC-esque betrayal of all the fans who stuck around loyally, waiting patiently and continuing to throw money at them in the offchance they'd fix problems that have gone un-acknowledged for literally decades. No, the solution is the exact opposite - to deem one style of Sonic the primary brand (sigh... the One True Sonic^TM, if you'd rather put it that way), and put their focus on building and polishing that one Sonic to a higher state of being with every game they make. And along the way, not trying to sell themselves on some god forsaken gimmick out of nowhere - just put the focus on the simple act of making moving fun. That really shouldn't be asking so much, and it kind of pains me that I have to go to so much effort to explain it.