Modern Sonic: The Inevitable Evolution of an Icon

so if you clicked on this video I probably don't need to explain to you who modern sonic is right I'm sure you have a basic understanding of this design of the character yet I still feel compelled he me just as a formality please give you a bit of a history of the modern sonic design and yes I said modern because as we all know sonic had a little bit of a change in look where his eyes went from green to black he got a little shorter and cuter and his games focused up and got their act together to create an excellent title tightly focused on momentum based high speed platforming now believe it or not this current sonic design has been used before yeah before this lanky green-eyed monster ah s'ti they actually had Sonic games on this thing called the Sega Genesis named as such because it was found in the Garden of Eden it's that old it's kind of like Trix cereal where they originally were spheres before they were turned into a bunch of fruit shapes only to later return back into balls same idea hmm all right um well I don't drink here's a fun drinking game for any who can partake go down to the comments and take a drink every time you find a comment from somebody trying to correct that obvious set of jokes I just made of course this is not modern sonic this is then if you don't know me hi I'm Nick welcome and I have made it very very clear I am a fan of Sonic the Hedgehog on this channel specifically the classic games so far and more specifically Sonic 3 & Knuckles the greatest game with the dumbest name and because of this you could safely assume that I favored those games over the others if while that is true I can't honestly say I always prefer the classic Sonic design over the modern I mean have you seen my console collection do you really think I was bothered that much by his eye color well I did go over why Sonic's original design works so well in my first ever video I've been jonesing to break down this version of Sonic no no have you been jonesing for me to talk about more modern Sonic games in general so well I still have the Saturn games to go over and chaotix and plenty of other classic stuff I figured I'd at least throw you a bone and get this off my chest at the same time so today for his birthday I vie to over the how and why this sonic went through such a drastic transition and how it's not actually that much of a transition and time it is but you know well we'll get into it and mm ish eiated you might be wondering what's the big deal these designs are so similar they might as well just be slapped onto a spot the difference challenge on the back of a diners kid's meal just call it a day but these subtle changes do matter quite a lot and as we'll find out they might have actually been necessary because this has been the default design for a grand majority of the series entire existence once 1998 hit this was sonic that is at least until Sonic Generations where they firmly established a modern design and a classic design and then sonic forces establish them as entirely separate characters but even with these two distinct designs you'll still have fans arguing over the variations of game models art styles and action figure accessories in hey look I'm sure you spent a long time on that tier list and we're also proud of you but when I say modern you know what I mean spare me the semantics and with all that said let me immediately be a hypocrite and talk about all the variations between the classic sonic designs back in the day see as much as I love the original sonic design it was quite a process to get here and even when they dropped the rabbit's fangs and busty girlfriends that process never really stopped Sega's communication between their Japan Europe and American teams was notoriously miserable while the idea of building the sonic brand in a way that would make sense for the cultures of those respective regions was novel it also led to a lot of inconsistencies a lot of which they're still trying to recover from today fans like a rag on Greg Martin's covers of the original Genesis games for that infamous thin mohaka quills but I mean can you really blame the guy for landing on that look it's clearly based around the game sprites not the Japanese art Sonic's head looks round the shading on the quills makes them look what he's got long pointy shoes that's not like Sega was correcting anything anything Sega of America intentionally made him look a little more punk-rock it's just what it is that said that still didn't stop the full-body quills of the Japanese design making their way over here in America seriously both of these designs were everywhere and that's not even mentioning the continuities of the separate cartoons and comics which hardly resembled anything in the games not that it really mattered that much to us kids in the 90s I mean the Green Ranger had his Dragon shield the film was all grainy and the action was a lot more fun but then it would turn into this horrible puffy vest any time he was in the command center Ninja Turtles for pizza loving party dudes but also violently murdering robots in uniform red bandanas on the NES cover of their game then that turns out that was because there was this whole violent parody comic book way before anything else from the franchise my point is kids of the day were plenty aware of multiple continuities and inconsistent art styles still I personally found it frustrating that all of this extra media never properly reflected the games I mean we barely got any kind of sonic toys and even those couldn't stay consistent with his quills but that all would change when Sega would finally release nope not there quite yet I can't give you the perspective of anybody other than myself a little kid growing up in the Midwest who really didn't talk to other kids about his favorite game series but thankfully my uncle was only a few years older than me and so he's basically my big brother and he paid attention to games media and in turn I could pay attention to games media and I could pay attention to the variations from Sonic game to Sonic game I really wasn't that aware of different developers outside of the Nintendo and Sega branding but Geppetto believed on the Saturn hit I certainly got to know the differences between Sonic team and travelers tales it was around the point of a Saturn I hadn't noticed something that had changed without anybody really bringing attention to it Sonic's Mohawk was gone like across the board it was just gone even though the early 3d bonus stages of Sonic 2 showed us what his quills should look like from behind we were still getting those ugly McDonald's toys with those flat quills for Sonic 3 but by the end of 94 they had all but disappeared in all the media outside of thing I mean you look at the comics and suddenly he's got full 3d quills and the next Sonic toy I saw which were pretty rare back then was this goofy Hot Wheels set and I remember being dumbfounded to finally have a little figure with the proper hairstyle he just looked so much better like this and I can't help but feel like the saturn era of games was where we first started seeing all these styles converge and fall more in line with the original Japanese design and seriously just look at this art for sonic 3d blast clearly this was a sign of things to come at this point real quick I need to jump in here and tell you that I'm recording this portion unscripted and after I'd edited everything else in this video that the importance of due diligence when doing your research because I was just gonna blindly assume this artwork I just showed you was done by the artist we're gonna be talking about here in just a second the same artist who designed the original modern sonic I just assumed is the same artist because this design is so clearly similar to the sonic adventure art but it's also drastically different from some other official sonic art from the other artists so I did a quick peek and sure enough the sonic I'm showing you here is from a largely overlooked artist and I found this article on fan bite calm and I highly recommend you guys go check this out I'll leave a link in the description here but believe it or not this image I'm showing you here is for the cover of a Sega Saturn magazine made by one Satoshi okano he was brought on the Sega in 96 and he actually helped come up with the name sonic jam and this artwork of his actually inspired Yuji naka himself to do another contest to figure out the new design for Sonic in his new Dreamcast game very similar to how they first created Sonic to begin with his are inspired that and Satoshi was one of four artists who put down some art for Sonic Adventure he actually had to go against the original guy who created Sonic and well the guy who would go on to create modern Sonic then that kind of sucks this guy clearly helped inspired the final design and he ended up losing this guy is so horribly overlooked to the point where I almost completely missed him and if I'd known this part making this video I would have spent far more time talking about him and his contribution to this design but I still couldn't just let this go unsaid it's so incredibly important for what we are talking about today and if I wanted to give you a fun little history lesson in the modern sonic design it would have been horribly embarrassing to leave this guy out so go check out his work go check out the article and let's get back to the video just as America was finally getting it together in terms of getting Sonic's look right the 90s were coming to a close and sonic was finally ready to show off what he could do in 3d [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] this alone is all you really need to understand why the modern sonic design worked but hey we still have a video to make so let's break this down a lot of this information comes from the sonic art book so if you have not read that for yourself I highly recommended this was an awesome read I told you all that preamble to give you a better understanding of what it was like for me as a sonic fan throughout all of the 90s while Sonic's modern design might have been a drastic change for a lot of us if you've been paying close enough attention you could see that it was always leading to this point yu-gi-oh kala took over as character designer during the Saturn era and as you can see his art style evolved through those games he had a pretty good handle on Sonic and what made that character work and that's what makes his take on the character work he understood the iconic elements of the classic design the mono eye the unmistakable silhouette of the quills in the blue fur and he doesn't shy away from those elements he actually brings more emphasis to them Ruby Bob called Sonic a punk-rock Mickey Mouse and you know that's a great description for classic Sonic Yugi put less emphasis on the Mickey Mouse portion and more on the punk rock even though Disney and Looney Tunes and classic cartoons were heavy inspirations for the updated design as well as a cure Toriyama among others but what I'm trying to say is that made him look less cute and more like a badass so as subtle as it may be they did darken his fur and they actually also altered the skin tone as well to match the new blue this darker blue is one of the many subtle hints as Sonic has grown and yes now his eyes are that infamous green and part of my artists brain doesn't feel like it works completely well compared to old black because it clashes with the rest of the color scheme but I mean that was kind of the point Yugi intentionally made Sonic's eyes green to contrast from the rest of the design and also as a nod to the many many Green Hill Zone Sonic loves a zip around in and just giving the dude irises gives them this energy this intensity that wasn't there before I mean he's not fully aggressive but he's not cute either and there's a larger emphasis on his quills and these were made longer because all of Sonic was made longer it was made to help balance out the entire design because yeah Sonic's actual limbs are linked earr dude seems taller or at least his proportions have shifted a bit his he's much slimmer than before in his arms well I mean now he looks like he could give Luffy a run for his money classic sonic had speed and pinball baked into the design and mechanics modern sonic doesn't look like scrunching into a ball it would be his first move I make it still do it but now when I look at this design I feel like it's more like you know how Samus can turn into a morph ball and you don't really question where the limbs go you just accept that this happens and I mean that's fine because the trade-off is that sonic looks more like a proper runner now the long flowing limbs of Buick Kawas early work really reflected a lot of graffiti art style that was really prominent in those days and it works for Sonic because even in still images he always looks like he is moving and that's because Yuji is a damn good artist so this is cartooning and illustration 101 here something extremely important Western comics having done a lot of research on manga but I'm assuming it's the same idea and that's I flow or page flow or just flow a good artist will have you jump from panel to panel in a comic book without ever needing to explain to you what panel you need to go to and they'll do that in subtle little hints in the design in these panels and that's what's going on in these early designs of adventure sonic or modern sonic whatever II want to call them even in these promotional images your eyes are flowing through this design and I think that's why this modern version is so brilliant they didn't take away from anything that made Classic Sonic so iconic they emphasized everything that made that design work and then added a flow to it a rhythm through the whole design and while many will still find these a bit too stylized and even hua Kawas more recent sonic line work is wildly different from what it was in the late 90s this was still a very strong first impression right out of the gate for this updated design sonic just looks faster than ever before even when he's not moving a muscle and this lankier sonic helps convey an older Sonic and while Sega has kept his age the same this was also intentional he has grown and matured even his rebellious carefree attitude has evolved from that Bart Simpson 90s gratitude all of these changes make the Hedgehog feel more competent than ever before this was no longer a sonic of the 90s this was a sonic for the new millennium but as the art director of adventure said these changes were necessary first and most obviously sonic had been basically m.i.a through the entirety of the lifetime of the Sega Saturn Sega was desperate and the Dreamcast needed a drop in a big bad way and they needed their star Blue Boy to lead the charge but they couldn't just use what they had been using for so long I mean yeah a lot of us older fans are nostalgic for the classic days now but if Sonic mania had dropped in 1998 nobody would have been happy about it Sonic wasn't that old back then and Mario had dropped a revolutionary 3d game two whole years prior to this we were anxious to see what Sonic was going to do he had skipped an entire Sega game system if they're gonna make us wait it had better have been worth it and coming back with the same old thing was not gonna cut it and say it knew that as subtle as these differences are in modern Sonic's design they still put a huge emphasis on them I mean look at this promotional poster from Sonic Adventure it's nothing but that more aggressive smirk and those sharp green eyes you knew who those eyes belong to but you knew something was different he had to be more intense and in-your-face than ever before and his new look would also tie in with the new vibe of Sonic Adventure the more realistic world setting the music that had a heavier focus on rock and the game's new focus on a narrative driven plot and that has more to do with Sonic aventure itself so we'll get into the actual story of that game another time but what I want to talk about here is just the general shift in terms of Sonic's storytelling at this point as I had already mentioned Sega just kind of let the different regions go nuts with their own canons but the arrival of this new Sonic finally brought a voice to the game's proper and this new design would not make sense with our Cole's voice Ryan Drummond's vocals helped aged up the Hedgehog along with the color and lengthier legs and he would help set the standard for voice actors going forward of course over in Japan Junichi has been rocking the same role since 98 so good on you man and I don't mean a short shame here at all but this leaner more limber Sonic despite the cordoning nature of the adventure stories it's just a bit easier to take a little more seriously with these changes he looks more like an action hero than ever before he doesn't look like a kid anymore and look yes I know that here in America we got Sonic said I am but that Sonic still felt like a child that version of Sonic was in a world where Robotnik rule as confident and cocky as he was he still spent a lot of time hiding in a bunker or on eco-terrorism stealth missions you put modern sonic in this world though and he'll have Robo chocolate cleared out faster than you can say I'll take my eggs over-easy so I may have a bit too much power in his world I keep talking about that in terms of sonic forces but he really does feel like a character that can keep an overwhelming power like Eggman at bay the suit has space stations and egg fleets can summon ancient gods and like there's a lot of crazy crap all the time and this sonic feels like he can keep up with all of those challenges again I'm not saying you can't tell a solid story with a classic design I mean for crying out loud I couldn't shut up about Sonic Rees narrative and that gargantuan video I made but for a speedy character shorter limbs don't make the greatest sense when you're trying to do dynamic poses and classic sonic just looks like a kid and if you've been growing up in the 90s and absorbing all the extra media Weinke sonic wasn't exactly a new thing if you'd experienced the ova or just looked at the cover of the archie books artists were already giving length to his arms and legs well before Sonic Adventure arrived all that really did was make his eyes look a little more intense and grow out his quills and I mean looking back on these old covers now that makes a lot of sense it just balances the whole design a little bit better he looks super weird with long legs and short quills but speaking of those random continuities that was something else this updated Hedgehog managed to wrangle in now that Sonic of the video games finally had a voice and a huge emphasis on story it wasn't as easy for the comics to interpret the games as loosely as they had done up to that point both Archie and STC in Europe had to work their narratives around adventure and Sonic's new look Archaea kind of just lost their minds for an entire issue again we'd kind of seen link here Sonic plenty up to that point but um they were moving into the adventure era and they still had to explain why Sonic look different at all and in this case apparently a super emerald just makes them taller and gives them green eyes and also it explicitly points out that buckles are now on some juice because I guess emeralds have a fashion sense I don't know for me and I'm sure a lot of other fans we love the idea that Sonic's change in design was brought upon both by age and by exposure to chaos energy or some other since like that not really sure I needed the same emphasis on his uh shoes though I mean the dude he's grown taller just you needed new shoes he outgrew the other ones and Sonic the comic I mean they change his eye color but they kept his stocky classic design so I know it just kind of looks weird but all of this said it still leaves out the biggest reason to change Sonic's look because it wasn't just for promotional material it wasn't just for a narrative it was because they had to there were gameplay challenges when bringing 2d sonic to 3d as um as you might have heard before they flat out said it was essential to change Sonic's look again the sonic art book really broke down a lot of what I'm explaining to you and I'm actually just gonna pull a quote from the art director who described a couple of instances about simple issues of bringing the classic character design into a 3d world quote for instance the third-person camera would follow Sonic from behind from a certain height to give the player an idea of the area in front of them but when we use our existing character models which were very short in size Sonic's head suddenly looks so big that you did not really see anything below his body was obscured and you could hardly see his arms and feet to us it was clear we needed to change Sonic's basic design make him taller and change his head to body proportions and then they go on to explain some other little challenges like having to fill in the bling say you could have skipped pass in the 16-bit days we were long past the era of Greg Martin's interpretations of the sprites this was a new standard for Sonic building off the brilliant basis of what came before and serving as inspiration for future spin-off designs I know not everyone back then was as welcoming of these changes as I was and to this day we still have people arguing over which of these is the true Sonic but that those folks I'd like to ask in which of these is the true link how many of you first jumped into this series with the adult version of this character because he didn't start off as an adult in the games she was a kid originally and strangely enough link first saw this transition from child to adult the same year modern Sonic made his first appearance and also the same year that Godzilla got a tummy tuck so well I guess an idea was a very transitional year for everybody I mean seriously maybe it was just the right time and right place for me but I was growing up and very clearly the game industry was growing up to the 3d era was this awkward transitional stage and characters had to change along with it but even if you think of Toon Link or kid link first or you still prefer classic Sonic that's fine they're all still here they're all still valid and what's amazing is you still know who this character is despite the differences and they still work despite the shoddy games we get on occasion or radical changes in game design and in terms of modern Sonic despite having to overcome the many technical challenges of the Dreamcast days or having less of an emphasis on the more serious stories once we hit the 2010s this is still Sonic's current design and I completely understand the frustration many fans have these days when they compared his more modern games to what he used to be in the adventure era this sonic was custom designed for everything going on in those games and they have made a lasting impression that helped bring in a brand new generation of Sonic fans after the many many failings of Sega as a console creator this was the Sonic that was introduced to the world outside of Sega this was the Sonic that grabbed the attention of a whole new generation of kids this is the Sonic that helped safe the franchise that probably helped save Sega in general but even if Sonic isn't the exact same character he was back in adventure 1 & 2 I'm glad this look is still here and if I had any real issues with what it looks like today I'd say that the in-game character model just looks a bit too stiff for how fluid this design originally was I'd like to see more emphasis on those old-school flowing movements that were going on in those promotional materials we are well past the days of the challenges of early 3d I mean that's ultimately my frustration in terms of modern Sonic design well with the character and the games in general I don't feel like Sonic Team has taken full advantage of everything they can do with this design I mean they get close and all these years later adventure was pushing it hard for its day and those games still have a lot of lessons worth remembering boost is fun but it's almost a shame to be a 3d game it still gets distracted with other forms of gameplay and lost world I had some excellent ideas with that parkour but and really needed a sequel to really bring out all that gameplay can do I'm not saying we haven't had a lot of good 3d Sonic we have I'm just at the opinion that we can still do better we still haven't hit the pinnacle of what this franchise can be in the third dimension and that's what I see when I look at modern Sonic I see a lot of potential and I see the drive to keep moving forward because like I said this feels like the natural growth of the classic Sonic design sonic has always been about moving forward we were bound to get to this point and while we'll be harsh on a lot of these 3d games coming up it's not a love I understand where Sonic fans get frustrated when they see Sega backing away from crazier ideas instead of doubling down and improving upon them this design tells me that Sonic can evolve past the 90s that he is dynamic enough to work in multiple ways that he works in sillier stories and also more serious ones as well and yes you can get to extreme in both of those categories but I think all of us know as Sonic fans there is a middle ground in there between the oh-6 drama between the silliness of Sonic Colors between the more open-ended design of adventure and the more streamlined beuse games between your green hills and your city escapes between your princess alleys and Princess Elise's there are a lot of good ideas here this fan base is so prominent so prevalent so voracious so critical and yet so forgiving so weird yet so talented because there is a lot here in this franchise there is a lot here to honor and if we'd stopped at the 90s help we'd stop in the early 2000s we wouldn't get where we need to get to with this series and I want to see where this goes going forward and as many jokes as I make about people getting all up in arms about the lack of sonic news whenever we're in a bit of a drought it is a miracle we still get Sonic games but he still remains relevant enough to have this strong of a fan base there are a lot of sonic games I fight out do not what but that cocky little smirk of his always tells me don't worry about it we'll get it right next time then even if they don't you know what they always throw us enough amazing stuff in between all the weird ideas and I'm I'm pretty okay with it be a classic Sonic be a modern Sonic this character means a lot to us for a lot of reasons and while I have my preferences on gameplay designs and mechanics and certainly wouldn't be a fan if I hated the modern Sonic design it's been around as long as it has been because it just works it look it just boils down to this modern sonic matters because sonic still matters and that's all there really is to it - to Sonic the Hedgehog and happy birthday [Music] [Music]

Channel: Game Apologist

Views: 125,219

Rating: 4.9421725 out of 5

Keywords: sonic the hedgehog, modern sonic, game apologist, sonic adventure, dreamcast sonic, green eyes, soap shoes, perfect chaos, sonic 29 birthday, 1998 sonic, city escape, dr eggman, robotnik, sonic satam, Yuji Uekawa, classic sonic, sega, genesis, mega drive, sonic jam, why sonic matters, why modern sonic matters, game apologist sonic, videogames, gaming, retro gaming, 3d sonic, Satoshi Okano, tails, knuckles, boost, adventure, station square, unleashed, colors, forces, rush, archie, stc

Id: TkFHUN9nfJw

Length: 26min 21sec (1581 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 24 2020