The Painful Truth Behind the Veil of Sonic Nostalgia

It is time that we, as a unified gaming community, tell Sonic to go the hell away. It is time we realized the madness and false assumptions and clouds of delicious nostalgia that have been screwing with our judgement for far too long. It’s time we came to our damn senses and admitted the truth.

The Sonic formula kind of sucks.

I know. It’s hard. But you have to let go. You know this to be the truth.

So many of us have deeply cherished memories of the Sonic games on the Genesis. So many of us have been clamoring for a return to those golden days ever since the blue hedgehog went 3D and multiplatform and started hanging out with that colorful group of annoying animal friends that just wouldn’t leave us alone no matter how many times we insulted their stupid spiky gloves or told them no one wanted to fish in a goddamned Sonic game you stupid fucking purple cat.

Look, before you go throwing things at the screen in blind rage, I’m not saying the Sonic games weren’t good… for their time. That’s the key isn’t it? What was once brilliant simply no longer works in a modern context.

The Sonic franchise represents a bygone era of design concepts that have become annoying, passe, outdated, and generally shunned by game developers with even the slightest bit of sense. It would be one thing if the Sonic games just made us deal with a few outdated concepts here and there. I think we could probably forgive that in the name of nostalgia and a good time. It’s not that simple, sadly. 

See, the Sonic formula is made up almost entirely of game design ideas that have no place on a modern console. The entire design process of these games is pretty much a bunch of developers sitting in a room coming up with as many ways to be complete fucking dicks as they possibly can.

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