Why is it that Mega Man could get away with exploring much darker themes, plotlines, and characters in later entries...

Why is it that Mega Man could get away with exploring much darker themes, plotlines, and characters in later entries, whereas Sonic the Hedgehog was roundly mocked for doing the same thing?

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megaman is cool and sonic is cringe
simple as

1. Sonic is a much more popular and universal series
2. Nobody actually likes the X series except autistic spics
3. The X series gets dunked on all time for autistic melodrama, but the fans of the series don't care
4. The Zero series actually did a serious story with really good presentation and payoff

On that last point, Sonic's issue is not with having dark or serious stories, it's the presentation. The presentation of Sonic games is always too goofy or stilted for most people to take them seriously even if games like Sonic Adventure 2 have similar story beats to other "dark" children's media like Pokemon The First Movie. Beyond that, when Sonic went multiplatform things started slipping for his games in quality so it became cool and trendy to shit on Sonic or hold double standards towards the IP.

Autistic fan of both IPs btw, Mega Man and Sonic are life.

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Zero and X are poorly written shitfests though. It's probably because at least when crapcom makes badly written stories, they make an actually playable game with it. There isn't a sonic 06 of megaman, even the 'extremely hard' gameboy advancd one is pretty manageable.

Sonic satam did it fine though, it just has to be done right because at face value it’s a series about small colorful animals

People hate/laugh at the story in the X games, but the gameplay and controls are good enough that story doesn't matter. 3D Sonic gameplay is boring and easy.

>There isn't a sonic 06 of megaman
mega man x6 and x7 are worse than 06.

They made more then one Mega Man series, and let each be it's own thing. That way, expectations were kept more in check.

Robots aren't anthropomorphic animals.

combined with the goofiness of Mega Man's characters and universe, the fact people kept wanting the series to stay 8-bit and complained about 8's animeisms (voice acting aside) made it hard for me to believe if it was supposed to be a fairly lighthearted but also grounded series, or just a gritty and "realistic" one.

Like, come the fuck on.

I think he’s talking about the Archie comics, not the games

Mega Man literally has robots made out of fucking stone and wood, and also robots themed after clowns and frogs. I'd argue it feels a lot sillier than Sonic can at times.

LOL

In that case both of them were shit and deserve whatever ridicule they get 10 times over. Ian Flynn's a fucking hack. The Mega Man comic was so well received and I thought it blew ass, just read Megamix instead.

Penders begone.

Being serious isn't necessarily bad, but being emo/chuuni is an embarrassment. Mega Man can get away with being more edgelord just because the premise is less goofy. Even still, Mega Man did reach funny levels of edgelord at times, and wasn't exactly Majora's Mask in terms of being serious. But being more cringe than SA2 or Shadow would require a real purposeful effort. And I'm not trying to shit on Sonic. CD is probably more serious and mature than any Mega Man media, and showed real sci-fi moods and emotions without any dialogue at all.

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That is entirely the issue though. Ian Flynn only gets any praise at all because he's compared to Penders, one of the worst writers in human history. Anybody would look like an upgrade compared to that. Flynn's jokes suck, his pacing is abysmal, he writes characters OOC all the time and fans pretend he doesn't. Guy blows.

x6 is fine. x7 I never played so I dunno but it looks like shit so I don't even wanna.

Several reasons. First off, with Mega Man, Capcom was smart enough to separate different themes and concepts into different worlds. Classic, X, Legends, Zero, Battle Network, Star Force, all of these are different titles. What happens in one doesn't necessarily affect the other, even if it's part of the same timeline. Classic stays as Classic, Zero stays as Zero.

Sonic insists on having everything happen in the same "world" with the same characters.

That's bullshit considering both games actually function.

yeah, they don't have an excuse for being so shit like sonic team had with being forced to release a literal beta build to meet M$' deadlines for their marketing rights deal.

>Mega Man
>serious
Mega Man literally shits the bed any moment it attempts "serious" writing. I'd say it reads like bad anime but even anime doesn't get this bad.

This. It's only recently that SEGA has attempted to create a "Classic Sonic" world with it's own themes and tone.

Also, SEGA's management and Sonic Team's track record is raw ass. Sonic would get away with darker themes, plotlines, and characters if the games underneath were solid. But valid criticisms of quality got mixed in with subjective gunk like "Sonic's friends are the problem" and because SEGA is run by idiots and cowards, the criticisms were adopted entirely with no nuance.

Sonic's friends kind of WERE a problem. Instead of making a solid game with solid gameplay, they made unpolished minigame compilations. No one likes fishing in SA1, no one likes the mech segments in SA2. 3D Sonic games were always wildly unfocused.

Sonic Team hasn't abandoned edge or friends. Sonic Forces is arguably one of the edgiest and friend-heavy games in the series.

They were able to successfully separate the darker stories from the lighthearted ones. Not just the obvious way by having separate series but also by setting each series 100 years apart from each other so it is disconnected enough to not be an issue.

You forgot the part where Megaman crashed and burned soon after it went dangerously edgy.

The only series that sort of got off scott free was Zero but nobody played ZX.

X6 is souls autism incarnate but x7 can
>burn to the ground

ZX sort of strayed too far from the previous side-scrollers. Trying to make a relatively large interconnected world doesn't really work when simplicity was one of the series' greatest strengths.

>Sonic Forces is arguably one of the edgiest and friend-heavy games in the series
With such a noncommittal attitude that anyone who wanted any of what was mentioned was left unfulfilled

It helps that whenever Capcom wanted to make a big change to the tone or setting they'd create a new series, rather than trying to cram Rock into a post-apocalyptic environment.

Hell, even Classic's gotten away with having some darker stories, namely in the manga adaptation by Hitoshi Ariga. I think there it's helped by Classic already being so influenced by Astro Boy that leaning into the kind of varied tones you'd see in those stories wasn't as big a stretch.