BlazeHedgehog wrote:There's just no love for the character or the franchise anymore. This has been especially evident in Shadow the Hedgehog and the recent TeamXbox interview for Sonic 2k6. "Oh, well, we were doing a new Sonic game anyways, we just decided to put a bit more effort into it because it's his 15th anniversary."
From that I get the impression that you never went back to read that quote and think about it. It's like you're desperate or something to find any excuse to not be optimistic about anything you see. Let me remind you of the truth:
Sonic Team: Initially, when they first started on the game, there was no real intention to bring it to next gen; they started thinking about it for current gen. But then they realized that, “oh, wait…this is going to be the fifteenth anniversary,” so there was a feeling [to] try to return to Sonic’s roots, and really try to think about what it is that makes Sonic so popular. Why is he still around and going so strong after 15 years? That was the starting point for it.
They had started work on
a Sonic game for the current consoles. What kind of game, and how much of what we're seeing now was in that game to being with, we may never know. There's no telling how much it changed when they decided to use it to celebrate 15 years of Sonic. See, this could be interpreted both ways.
And now, OCB basically just kind of confirms what I've suspected. Nobody at Sega cares about Sonic. Nobody there actually wants to make a good game, they want to make a profitable game; quality be damned. It's no longer a case of saying, "Sonicteam needs to learn..." - now it's "Sonicteam doesn't want to learn, because learning isn't cost-effective."
What? The only people who care that lowly of the series are the PR kooks paid to write the corny press releases for these games and market them. (Can't speak for all of them, but you get the idea, and PR guys generally have bullseyes on their backsides.) We're talking about Sonic Team here, a studio that has only made
five Sonic games in their 15 year run on their own: Sonic 1, CD, Jam, Adventure, and this. Only two of which were directed by Iizuka (Jam was a compilation, and Adventure wasn't necessarily a bad game). Everything else has been either done by another party, with or without limited involvment/supervision/both on the team's part. My point is that the few Sonic games they have made happen to have been crafted with care in some manner. They have an excellent track record to uphold and have shown no sure signs of losing their step yet, so it's downright outlandish to assume
they, in particular, have stopped caring.
Sonic Next is the product of a mostly new japanese Sonic Team, with Naka and most all the other familiar faces gone to set about on other things. It remains to be seen if that's going to hurt or help the quality of those few games for the series they put out. Think of it like Mario - Miyamoto doesn't craft a landmark Mario game that often, but he typically does a kick ass job of it when he does.
In short, know who to hold grudges against (Dimps, Backbone, Takashi Iizuka, those sort of imcompetentcies) before making wild accusations and conspiracy theories about corporate greed running rampant across the board. Oh, and "basically just kind of confirms what I've suspected"? Are you even sure what hell you're getting at?