SPOILERS FOR: Sonic Series
Mad scientist Dr. Robotnik is a feminist. So says the manual for the
latest "Sonic the Hedgehog" game, Sonic Heroes. I hadn't realized what a
sensitive guy Robotnik/Eggman was. This piece of information led me to
think that despite the previews, maybe there'd be some originality in the
new game's plot and characters. Unfortunately, it soon became clear that
Sonic and friends are dead.
That is, they aren't alive. They're flattened between manual pages or onto
a DVD, as two-dimensional characters. The characters haven't changed in
the over-a-decade since their creation. They aren't allowed to change.
Probably, Sonic Team decided that fans like Sonic & Co. exactly the way
they are, and that the original versions of the characters are the ones
that will sell best. Maybe that's true, since there's always a new batch
of young kids to discover them, but some fans at least feel sorry for
characters who've gotten stuck as unchangeable merchandising icons.
Sonic, by his own admission, is just a fun-loving guy who's fast. Those
are his only character traits. Knuckles punches things, is dour, and
spends all of his time guarding a jewel. Eggman has inexhaustible supplies
of robots, aircraft, and machinery, and wants to conquer the world. These
people are almost as simplistic as characters can get. The game manuals
are even starting to make fun of them, mentioning Eggman's "unfeasibly
high IQ of 300." To the extent that they get any more description, like
Eggman's commitment to feminism, it's never mentioned in the games. (It
could have been, say by a surprising comment towards Amy or Rouge, and it
would have been interesting and funny.)
Tails has a bit of a personality: he's an inventor, he lives in a workshop
on a cliff surrounded by ruins, he idolizes Sonic, and he's capable of
showing fear. But that personality, and what little there is for everyone
else, gets thrown away in Sonic Heroes. In one of the opening videos,
Tails even ditches his airplane, presumably leaving it to crash somewhere.
That opening eliminates any difference between Tails and the other flying
characters, between Sonic and the other runners, and between Knuckles and
the other fighters. (He also gets an even more childish voice.) The "Dark"
characters get the same treatment. Rouge finds the guy who saved her life
and was thought dead, and has zero reaction. Shadow, the mysterious living
secret weapon, is just a recolored version of Sonic now. He could have
been more. He *was* more in the previous game, but he got whitewashed and
reset to his original personality and memory. Let's not even discuss Amy
or Big.
The Sonic games are just action games and aren't meant to have any plot,
you could say. But having a formulaic series of games doesn't force
designers to trap characters in the same one-sentence descriptions. Look
at the Legend of Zelda games, in which the designers experimented with new
plots. Ganon the evil pig-guy developed into Ganondorf, the destined male
leader of the desert-dwelling Gerudo tribe, driven mad by taking one-third
of the Triforce and bound to the lives of Zelda and Link. Hyrule got
destroyed and another culture developed legends about Link's adventures.
Link fought nightmares and a boy possessed by a mask. A pair of
fan-fiction stories even put the games in chronological order and pointed
out the decay of the Lost Woods, the devolution of the Zora, and
Ganondorf's reaction to the generations of war. The change in the
characters and setting between games created a hidden story that the
designers probably never intended. But there isn't any such change in the
Sonic games, so there's no history, no memory, no life to them. For an
even more extreme case of a formulaic game series with a plot arc and
character development, see Megaman X. By the latest game, Maverick Hunter
X even becomes a diplomatic pacifist!
It's disappointing to see that Sonic and friends are dead. It would have
been interesting to see them change from their experiences, because that
change would have opened up new plots. An older Tails working for Eggman
to do something other than conquer the world? Rouge doing actual
treasure-hunting? The world becoming high-tech to reflect the fact that
there was a huge space station built two generations ago? Nothing so
interesting is ever going to happen so long as Sonic Team assumes that
fans want only Sonic version 1.0. Sonic is a pop-culture icon and that's
too bad, because icons aren't alive.
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