I think, for a little while, I’m just going to focus more on posting art, and perhaps limit the time I spend just browsing here and the Internet in general—basically spread more good stuff (art) while making sure the toxic stuff doesn’t get to me as much.
Part of the reason is happily because I am actually on a bit of a creative streak at the moment, but the…”discussion”…surrounding Sonic Frontiers’s IGN trailers thus far is a serious wake-up call about the Internet’s tendency for manufacturing drama for clout and the importance of spending way more time “touching grass” than I do now. You’d think after judging the ultimately-decent Halo Infinite based on its lousy first trailer, or more recently the Johnny Depp vs Amber Heard Trial where Mr. Depp was falsely accused of being the abuser before the public trial made it all too clear that it was actually Ms. Heard who was in the wrong, that people would learn not to jump to conclusions and make themselves SO unnecessarily angry over nothing. Without going into too much detail, Internet personalities that otherwise don’t seem to care about Sonic either way (i.e. they don’t seem to have watched either of the movies or reviewed them, and in some cases even admit to not even caring for the classic Genesis games or Mania let alone any of the more-divisive recent games) are already declaring this game to be more awful and rushed than Sonic 06 or Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric.
This is absolutely baffling to me, because 1) IGN has specifically stated that we’ll be getting more and more information throughout this month, so people are clearly already judging the final game based on incomplete information—we don’t even know the story context of why, for instance, the robots look the way they do or what Sonic’s doing in this glorified UE4 map in the first place; 2) the trailers seemed to be EXTREMELY compartmentalized thus far to focus on one aspect, without showing how all the parts work together—for example, it seems the player is deliberating avoiding combat in the exploration trailer and vice-versa in the combat trailer, and it looks like a lot of things are supposed to be turned off to make things even more focused (like the UI—where did Sonic get the rings he loses in the combat trailer, and how do we know how many rings we have at any moment?) but of course inevitably makes the open world feel empty as a result.
Finally 3) A lot of the more valid criticisms, like the weak-looking combat and minor performance hiccups, also apply to Breath of the Wild and the PC version of Elden Ring, but while those two games obviously don’t appeal to every single type of person in existence, they are considered the absolute gold-standards of open-world design right now and Elden Ring in particular was basically given 10/10 reviews right before release. I don’t see why Sonic Frontiers deserves to be declared a negative-twenty out of ten in comparison when we aren’t even done seeing IGN’s month-long coverage of it. If I MUST offer my knee-jerk reaction based on incomplete info, I actually saw some interesting potential in the combat trailer specifically and it looks to at least be a 7/10 Breath of the Wild clone that will definitely keep me occupied until I see the end credits. It’s also clearly the opposite of Sonic Forces simply by virtue of being an open world game instead of being a glorified on-rails linear rollercoaster (but somehow more boring) like Forces was, which to me is a VERY good sign.
So yeah, I genuinely cannot understand the strong emotions in either direction about Sonic Frontiers when we clearly still don’t know much more about it yet than we did before, although I suppose SEGA’s marketing team (not the developers) deserve some constructive criticism for failing to get us truly excited so far and leaving us with more questions than answers.
Point is, either Twitter’s gone mad with power after convincing Paramount to fix “Ugly Sonic” or people have gone mad in general post-lockdowns, proving that spending hours on the Internet in front of our phones is the worst possible way to take care of our stress levels while being stuck inside. Thus I’ll try to just use the Internet in general this month to post more funny art and watch more IGN Sonic Frontiers videos without letting game “journalists” or the comment section kill my optimism. Starting now:
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Let’s Go Manchin
