Sonic is dead, and no amount of nostalgia-fueled CPR is going to bring him back.
Every game, every movie, every comic, is just another drop in Sega’s bucket of diminishing returns. Sonic doesn’t have a future; he has a shelf life, and it expired years ago. The only reason anyone is still paying attention is out of habit or misplaced hope. But hope won’t save Sonic. Innovation might have, but Sega abandoned that concept long ago in favor of squeezing every last cent out of a dying brand. And honestly? It’s about time we let Sonic rest in peace.
Let’s stop pretending the franchise has any pulse left. Sonic x Shadow Generations scraping together 1.5 million units? Embarrassing. In an industry where mid-tier, uninspired shooters outsell that without breaking a sweat, Sonic couldn’t even capitalize on the billion-dollar momentum from his movies. That’s not a franchise—it’s a hospice patient hooked up to a Sega-branded ventilator, and the air is running out. And to those yelling “But the sales prove it’s a good game!” stop embarrassing yourselves. Sales aren’t a metric for quality; they’re a metric for branding and curiosity. You know what else sold well? Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric. Was that a good game? Absolutely not. People didn’t buy Sonic Frontiers because it was good—they bought it because they hoped it might not be bad. And then they played it, and reality set in.

>>714978087 (OP)
Spoiler: it still sucked. The open world? A soulless wasteland of floating rails and generic enemies that feels like an Unreal Engine tech demo with Sonic hastily Photoshopped in. The gameplay? A Frankensteinian mess of ideas pilfered from better games (Breath of the Wild cough cough) but with none of the polish or substance. Sega isn’t making Sonic games anymore—they’re running lab experiments and charging $60 for the privilege.
Mediocrity isn’t worth celebrating, and neither is Sega’s refusal to learn from its mistakes. Sure, the movies made a billion dollars, but how many people walked out of the theater halfway through? Funny how nobody counts that statistic. You think a billion dollars means people loved it? No, it means people paid for a ticket—big difference. Most of those tickets were bought out of morbid curiosity or for babysitting purposes. The Sonic movies aren’t cinematic masterpieces; they’re brightly colored distractions to keep kids quiet for two hours while parents scroll through their phones. And let’s be real: if Jim Carrey hadn’t carried those movies, now with Keanu Reeves on Shadow’s back, with the sheer force of their charisma, the box office numbers would’ve been a fraction of what they are/gonna be. Sonic himself? He’s a glorified co-star in his own franchise, overshadowed by better performances and plotlines that barely qualify as passable.
But go ahead, Sega, keep acting like those billion-dollar ticket sales mean anything for the games. Where’s the crossover audience? Oh, right, they’re nonexistent because the games are so laughably bad that even kids won’t touch them. Sonic couldn’t ride that movie hype into anything meaningful because his *actual product*,——you know, the thing this entire franchise is supposed to be built around—is rotten to its core.

Is this really the only way to get a thread going on /v/? Seems pathetic.

>>714978106
And speaking of things nobody wants to acknowledge, let’s address Sega’s lack of effort in even attempting to modernize their storytelling or character development. The games and the movies rely on nostalgia like a washed-up comedian recycling jokes from the '90s. Sonic isn’t evolving; he’s regressing. The voice acting, particularly the ENTIRE CAST, feels like Sega is actively trying to make the character more annoying with each passing year. Let’s call it what it is: bad. Sonic voice sounds like a middle-aged dude trying to sound like a cool teenager at a PTA meeting. That’s Sonic? The so-called “coolest mascot in gaming”? His performance is so flat and lifeless that it feels like Sega has given up entirely on capturing Sonic’s actual personality. Even Shadow the Hedgehog, the original edge-lord, has been reduced to a parody of himself—his “intensity” turned into a laughable caricature, thanks to bad voice direction and a writing team that doesn’t understand him. Sega’s “iconic” characters have been reduced to cardboard cutouts with catchphrases. He sounds like an over-caffeinated dad trying to sound hip, while the supporting cast barely rises above bland archetypes. These aren’t characters—they’re walking, talking placeholders designed to fill time between set pieces.

If Sonic were truly dead, like Megaman or Starfox, he wouldn't be getting big game releases or multimedia projects.

>>714979436
Sonic is dead in the sense that it's merely a brand now. It has no identity other whatever Sega needs it to be in that particular instance

Sneednic was never good

>>714978087 (OP)
It's far from dead

You can't talk about his husband like that.

>>714978163
Because /v/ is substitute for /pol/ at this point.

>>714978087 (OP)
You don't know what a real dead franchise is.