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Get ready to Open Your Heart, because “danger is lurking around every turn” in this episode, where we Live and Learn the problem with references in the Sonic series. Hopefully we aren’t Reaching for the Stars too much here…
—-Table of Contents——
0:00 Intro
0:29 Continuity
3:17 Discontinuity
4:18 The Reference Problem
8:18 Show, Don’t Tell
9:21 We Have Our Own Styles
12:00 Conclusion
14:08 End Screen
Intro song by Hyper Potions:
https://twitter.com/HyperPotions
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#sonic #sonicthehedgehog #sonicfrontiers
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Have you guys Opened Your Heart to these amazing Sonic references? Or are you just about ready to Show Them What You're Made of? Personally, I'm about to Green Hill Zone Act 3 myself to oblivion.
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I would say this is more of an Ian Flynn problem then a Sonic problem, you can go over both the Sonic and Mega Man comics he wrote for and see they are full of references to things in their respective series.
Honestly it is nice to have continuity after feeling like absolutely nothing matters in this series for so long, but it does feel a bit overboard I can agree.
I've had problems with how Ian writes characters, so I'm really not the best to give my two cents on this, but I will say that Frontiers has had better writing then anything the Sonic series has had in the past decade, so hopefully the criticism is taken to heart, and if Ian stays on he tones this issue people have been having down.
Hes became the type to say some shit like “this is giving sonic adventure vibes💅👁️👄👁️
The references never bothered me that much, but the balloons drifting in from Spagonia line was WILD lmao
ha Ha HA ONE!
Can you do a review on a pair of soap shoes and grind on rails? It is sonic related considering sa2 lol
i think that part of this is trying to solidify that all of these events happened
Sega literally said everything is canon so obviously IDW and boom is canon 😐
U just got yourself a brazillian fellow Sonic fan sub.
I hope Sega do what they did with sticks and IDW characters to chaos sonic from sonic prime. He’s such an awesome fucking character both in design and just personality. He’s a nice callback and breath of fresh air to metal sonic not to say metal sonic is bad, but if they want to put metal in but don’t wanna nostalgia pander, they could just put chaos sonic or something
I felt like the only good reference was dark gaia because when tails compared the strength of the END with dark gaia then we know how strong the threat is while building it up.
That was the only reference that i enjoyed.
I believe the male hedgehogs going super thing was referencing Super Amy.
I don't think he was outright contradicting Tails and Knuckles going super, but saying female hedgehogs don't possess the power to go super telling us Super Amy is something we will never get to see in canon.
Having listened to Flynn's podcast regularly, it saddens me to see Chaomix putting blame on him for things that are not his fault and shows a lack of research. Not the references themselves, those are more of a taste thing, but the idea that Flynn just mouths off internal secrets is a straight up lie. And there's a ton of misinformation here too, like the male hedgehogs going super thing.
My favorite part of the name drops is they don't exist in the Japanese version so I guess Sega isn't mandating jack shit to be canon.
Why are the chaos emeralds sexist and speciesist all of the sudden? What about Burning Blaze, Super Tails, and Super Knuckles? None of them are Hedgehogs and Blaze is female. I know that Blaze used the Sole Emeralds to transform. By that logic though, the Sole Emeralds can only turn female cats super which is equally stupid.
Do yourself a favor; DO NOT play Sonic Omens. I don’t want you to have an aneurism about how badly the story butchers Sonic Continuity: Especially with how it portrays Prison Island, & pastes Sonic X into an Unleashed Epilogue plot in a really sloppy way. On top of the game itself having really frustrating level design, difficulty spikes, bosses, the two atrocious Tornado stages, and being the product of some relatively toxic people with rightfully maligned intentions.
4:26 that’s actually a reference that makes sense within the context of the story since there is a connection between angel island and the ancients. Sonic noticing a connection makes quite a bit of sense.
The others? No
Free as the wind
The game mentioning Sticks and Tangle doesn’t canonize IDW or BOOM, it just states that versions of these characters exist in this game’s world.
Honestly, I was fine with the callbacks in Frontiers, it kinda felt like it was making up for the lack of continuity in the past chunk of games. But while it's not terrible, if it keeps up for future games it will most likely get more noticeable and annoying.
I agree, it gives a sense of "peaked in high school"
Hey I understood that reference!
2:51 Call me cynical, but the idea that Sonic's worldbuilding is on-par with big name RPGs is downright absurd.
ian flynn is alright for lore or whatever but i think that htey need to either get someone who has actually talked to another human being to do the dialogue or get said someone to do a pass over what he writes
You're a jerk
Honestly if you just want to badmouth them for every little thing they do why do you even like them?
I got frustrated with the fact that it he dialogue triggers were hard for me to find for some reason, now I’m not too upset about it 🙈
I disagree with the part about those lines making those entire continuities canon to the game continuity. Sonic himself is nor the same in each of them after all, there’s no reason that it must be the same Sticks and Tangle.
3:37 🔥🔥💯
The only reference I really like in Frontiers is in The Final Horizon, when Sonic says "Let's do it to it!" I also liked when Sonic's talked to Tails about him saving Station Square. But everything else was really forced.
Archie Ian Flynn was a good writer. His references were implied rather than just outright said. IDW and Frontiers just have the characters outright say random things that reference older things.
No Spongebob, the line mentioning a character from the comics does not mean the comics are canon in their entirety. It just means the character exists in the main canon and the comics.
8:45 in the next 3D game they will probably tease manic,Sonia and robotnik jr as cannon
To be fair to Ian, the mentions of things like the supposed lack of money in Sonic's world and how only male hedgehogs can go super are not things he came up with, they were guidelines given to him by Sega that he had to adhere to while writing for Sonic. If you take issue with the fact that he revealed them at all I guess that's an opinion you're allowed to have, but don't treat it like those were his terrible ideas
"Why is Tails' character arc ignored in the 2010s?"
It was ignored in fucking 2001 for gods sake. Don't act like this is unique to only post-2010 Sonic.
>"they"
>"Sonic Team"
It's Ian.
Most of what I could say on this particular topic are already pretty well covered by this video. I will, however, add one very minor anecdote:
The fact that Sonic is making all these callbacks to previous games, to me anyways, kinda just goes to show how little confidence Sonic Team/SEGA had in the ability of this game to stand on its own not just in terms of gameplay and story, but especially in aesthetics.
Say what you will about games like Shadow The Hedgehog, Sonic Adventure 2, Unleashed, etc. (and you’re probably right in most circumstances), but the one thing that is largely consistent across nearly all of them is the way the devs still managed to have the level themes and environments strike a nice balance between being aesthetically cohesive with the rest of the Sonic world/brand, while being distinct enough to stand on their own merits.
By comparison, much like Sonic ‘06 (and even to a decent extent Shadow The Hedgehog), Sonic Frontiers – from an aesthetic design viewpoint – doesn’t look or feel very cohesive with the rest of the Sonic world/brand. This is partially due to the hyper-realistic look of certain things like grass and trees, yes, but it’s also due to the fact that everything else – especially the various ruins of The Ancients scattered around the various islands – look and feel both out-of-place and extremely generic simultaneously. So much so, in fact, that if it weren’t for the whole “we’re controlling Sonic and his friends” bit, you could easily be forgiven for thinking the ruins (and the rest of the game, by-and-large) were some sort of scrapped prototype for a new Xenoblade Chronicles/Final Fantasy game.
The most annoying part of this whole thing is how Sonic suddenly has so much awareness of these zones that.. frankly just shouldn't have left a mark on him?
Like.. saying "this reminds me of Red Mountain" feels so weird because that is such a non-important level in the story that shouldn't have left a lasting impact on his character, it's just a level that a fan would get latched on, not a character.
Plus he really just doesn't seem the type that would care much about the places he runs through in his adventures, that' seems like something a fan would geek over instead
Knowing too much can be a huge weakness, being too overly aware of the past can seriously limit somebody's view of the world of fiction they're writing for. Ignorance is bliss sometimes
…
Also god the tarot cards, why are they pretending this throwaway piece of text in CD is suddenly the core of his character now? It's so unlike a real franchise to overly fixate on this forgotten detail, that's fanwankery to me.
Sonics dedication to continuity has even been a challenge at times. Like how it was clearly established that knuckles was the guardian of the master emerald and they had to come up with excuses for him to appear in games that didn't involve the master emerald
Reminds me of the time Tails crashed his plane
In my entire play through Sonic never referenced anything 🙁
litterally everytime this mf writes for a sonic game
I think this is the result of me trying to make a Mario pattern for a while without knowing how good it was.
Something you failed to mention about Ian Flynn talking about the money and male hedgehogs thing was the fact he was specifically referring to weird limitations that SEGA themselves have given him, not stuff he decided on