So I think I can turn the Sonic franchise around.

FOR THE GRIEVOUSLY UNDERINFORMED: Sega has not made a decent Sonic the Hedgehog game since 1994 and everyone who ever owned a Genesis is bummed out. The last couple of Sonic games were abominations, and when Sega tried to save face by rereleasing the first few games on GBA, they forgot to include things like “collision detection.” This is a bad place to be — something that the Smashing Pumpkins are probably going to find out when their new record drops — but it’s not entirely unsalvageable. Instead of shouting about a return to basics and an embrace of “core Sonic values”¹, why doesn’t everyone just embrace the hell out of how completely fucking insane everything has gotten? I never really followed the series (or serieses, I guess, at this point) past Sonic 3, and as an outsider looking in, the throng of bizarre spinoff characters looks like a great house party that nobody knows about. How can you hate a character called Big the Cat who is literally just a cat who is big???

Like: Cut your losses, guys. There’s probably no way to make a 3D platformer whose key hook is how fast everything goes without making it either eye-wateringly frustrating or just plain boring; half the process of playing 3D platformers is just fucking around with the floating camera until you can see where you’re trying to jump, and trying to dick with that when you’re chasing a rocket tank at 921MpH² just sounds horrible. The reason nobody’s happy with anything you’ve made in the past ten years is because you won’t just suck it up and make a side-scrolling platformer already, and until you finally get around to checking how many copies New Super Mario Bros. sold (hint: Approximately eleventy zillion), you aren’t going to dig your way out of this one.

Here’s a better plan — why don’t you just go whole-hog with Fang the Sniper and Rouge the Bat and all the other one-off third-tier hangers-on and just make a massive JRPG out of the whole mess? The people who’ve sketched out all the disparate Sonic worldlines can be sated if you throw them some rarely-seen faces; nobody will be able to compare it unfavorably to your first string of successes once you remove all essential similarities, and if you really want to keep trying for that platformer gold ring³, you can just pull a Crisis on Infinite Earths and kill off everyone you don’t need. The only real drawback I can see to this plan is that any JRPG worth its salt ends with the protagonists killing God, and I’m pretty sure Sonic managed to do that in his last button-mash go-round⁴, so maybe Robotnik gets to make a robot God or something. I don’t know, you’ll figure something out.

¹ I’m about 93% sure I actually heard this phrase thrown around on a messageboard, which officially ranks second for “most ludicrous effort at community-rallying I’ve ever heard.” First place goes to some friend of a college girlfriend of mine, who got really pissed off driving back from a hardcore show in Western Massachusetts and yelled, “We really have to work harder to increase scene unity, you guys!”

² I’m pretty sure someone, somewhere, has calculated Sonic’s approximate top speed, but that’s the sort of research I can’t bring myself to do since Google started cacheing your search queries.

³ Ba-dum ching!

⁴ Other goals achieved: History’s first woman/hedgehog romantic pairing. Can you even imagine how uncomfortable that would be? Did someone crib plot points from a Dirty Jokes sidebar in their dad’s Playboy collection?