#today i played more sonic p-06! its really fun!

[latin-dr-robotnik]

You know, since I started this blog and my other Spanish blog I always thought my opinions were maybe a little too strongly biased towards Sonic, even when talking about many other gaming franchises...

But hooooo boy this video is something else.

But it’s fine. This is the sort of video I would expect for the 30th anniversary next year, but having it today is nice as well. I don’t know if I would get as defensive as some of the moments of this video (specially that 20-minute long introduction), but I get it. S3K is also my favorite Sonic game, and one of my favs of all time. I played this at such an early age that -without ever thinking too much about it- this has set a standard for all things gaming for me (and I finally realize why I said what I said in this post about judging videogames harshly for their music, it’s because these games showed me so much more). It ain’t just nostalgia, it’s brilliant game design and a benchmark of how ambitious this franchise could get when it gets its shit together. I too felt sad every time Sonic 2 got all the praise while S3K was forgotten and talked only because lock-on or because MJ worked a bit on its music. I did get mad at IGN for a while for their utter disrespect to a franchise that, despite receiving fatal blows that would kill any other game franchise not only once, but twice, still lives to tell the story to this very day. But not that much anymore.

Sonic is special, very special. Just before finding this video I was wondering about why the 2D Sonic games were harder to get into (I have no plans to translate that into a Tumblr post, so it will stay in Spanish, sorry not sorry), and parts of this video not only explain that very same point, but also reach similar conclusions as I did. Being more than your traditional platformer is what sets Sonic apart, and this is a point brought on the video but not on my part, but the experimentation part of this franchise is also a very big atractive point, regardless of the result. We Sonic fans tend to complain about lack of consistency in the games, yet we still love 3D Blast, Black Knight, Unleashed, Heroes, Battle, Spinball and more. Sonic, as a character and as a franchise, never settles for less, for better or worse. That’s why is a bigger sin to have a boring Sonic game rather than an utterly broken one, and why games like Forces can be much more heartbreaking than '06.

But, even if I consider S3K this golden standard for all things Sonic and most things gaming, I have to disagree when the video asks us to refer to this very game when someone says “Sonic was never good”. I don’t need to pull out a 26-year old Sonic game -my fav in the series- to say this “was” a good franchise, because it still is. We are just coming out from one of the most successful movie adaptations of a videogame ever; we have lots of animations -official and fanmade- made out of pure love and respect from this franchise. We have some of the greatest videogame soundtracks of any videogame franchise period. We have 27+ years of varied TV series that tackled topics ranging from wacky and silly fun to serious story developments. We still have the record for the longest running comic series based on a videogame, even though said comic has been dead for some years now. We have one of the best and worst fandoms of all at the same time, filled with well-known infamous personalities, and some of the best, most talented writers and artists I��ve seen and even had the pleasure to talk to and share a laugh or an idea. We have one of the strongest fangame and reverse engineering communities out there, to the point some fans have proven to have the professional skill and love for the franchise to create one of the best official Sonic games of the past decade, while many others use their knowledge to kickstart their own indie careers in the industry. And best of all, we have one of the most iconic fictional characters of all time, even people that haven’t ever touched a Sonic game in their lives know what a “Sonic” is. 

If anything, we Sonic fans tend to undersell the value of this franchise, and while I can and will keep on referring to this game when the “best game” discussion pops up, I don’t really have to look that far back to find signs of Sonic’s greatness.

Even at its worst, this franchise keeps on chuggin’ along. (And there’s a reason why it keeps on going where other competitors have simply vanished from existence or been recently brought back for a quick nostalgia-check.)

On a different note, every time the Sonic fandom is brought up and how “Sonic fans keep fighting at each other when it would be better to leave our differences and join all together”, I can’t stop myself from thinking about this place, the Tumblr Sonic fandom, a place that can get a little bit tarnished due to the overall reputation of the site (it’s a constant love-hate relationship, I admit.) The place where we disagree from time to time but don’t really go nuclear on each other (at least not that often lol); the place where posts like this one pop up all the time, some with an astonishing amount of research and understanding of all the aspects of this franchise; the place where most people I’ve known (and even myself) said it’s “the best corner of the fandom.” And for that I raise my drink to all of you, thank you for sharing this passion together. 

(Now, can we get Nick to look at this place? :P)

“There’s a moment when you realize you’re playing your favorite game”

You know when I realized that? As soon as I found the very first giant ring on Angel Island Act 1.