#i expected better from you ohshima | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

rollflasher · 3 years

Note

Kinda bouncing off your post, y'know what irritates me the most about the decision to make Classic mute? It has created this weird mindset for a number of people both inside and outside of the fandom that Sonic would have been a much better character if he just didn't talk. I feel like this was also influenced by the "Classic always good, Modern always bad" mentality, so when people saw Classic not having a voice, they thought that, since Classic is a symbol of "the good old days" in the franchise, that Modern should follow suit and also just never talk again.

You know, for a long time I thought that Sonic being mute was a result of a bad misconception of the character based on superficial stigmas, and don't get me wrong I still stand by that, but I realised that SEGA is also at fault for this in a way, specifically because Sonic was not properly translated to the western audience. I don't know completely all the ins and outs of what happened internally, but I'm sure that both SoA and SoJ in one way or another were responsible for this.

Besides the obvious fact that Sonic CD had Sonic's memetic ''I'm outta here!'', the character was always meant to speak, the fact that his design is expressive to make up for technical limitations and that Ohshima was inspired by silent cartoons is irrelevant, and this is evidenced by the fact that the Japanese manuals always presented the character speaking as early as the first game, including an actual story.

However, as we all know, the US manuals simplified most of this content and focused much more on how awesome Sonic is.

And it wasn't just manuals, most western media focused a lot on selling Sonic as the epitome of coolness in all of it's 90s fashion, I think this is the reason why some people think of Sonic as a dated icon when that's not the case at all, but also I think this is reinforced by how these manuals flanderized what Sonic was about and by cutting and simplifying the story content, it created the illusion that the Classic games didn't really have a story. And when years go by and people replay these games by other means different from their original release forgetting about the manuals altogether, it reinforced more the idea that Sonic was actually meant to be a mute character, specially since all you have as reference is cutscenes with no dialogue.

But that's not all, while I'm very fond of it, the English dub of the games added more fuel to the fire.

See, as surprising as it may sound for some, Sonic games were always criticized for their voice acting even going as far as the original release of Sonic Adventure, I found out about this myself when looking at reviews of those games. Back then, shoddy voice acting was normal in video games and wasn't seen as such a big deal, and I'd argue Sonic was one of those cases where the voice acting was not that bad compared to other titles.

youtube

After all, this was the standard for English voice acting in video games at the time.

However, this was never an issue in Japan, since over there voice acting was always taken much more seriously than in the west, and as such, Sonic games always had good voice acting there.

youtube

This video shows a good comparison.

I can't speak for the Japanese audience, but I'm sure they never had as much problems with dialogue in Sonic compared to the west, for reference save for some separate cases, the Japanese Sonic voice cast remains the same after almost 23 years, with Junichi Kanemaru voicing the character ever since. Compare that to Sonic's millions of English voices.

As expected, because of localization issues, even if it's not that prevalent compared to other cases, the English games got extra cheesy dialogue that wasn't there in the original dub, and when the actual stories in Sonic took a massive downgrade in quality from Heroes onwards, I can theorise that people came to the conclusion that the problem was giving Sonic a voice, since SEGA would force him to throw cheesy lines to enforce coolness into his character (granted, this was toned down in later games, at least before Colors) which is the case for most western Sonic media. (The Archie comics and SatAM say hello with their use of dated 90s slangs)

And I know this is the case because I saw that most of who think Sonic should be mute cite the voice acting as a reason, I even saw a whole video breaking down the cutscene of Sonic and Shadow's final confrontation in SA2 explaining that it worked because of the body language of the characters, and not the dialogue, hence why they should be mute. It even had the premise of ''What's the coolest scene you can think of Sonic? Have you noticed that in those scenes you think about Sonic is not speaking?''

And here is where I point the blame at SEGA (Mostly SoA to be specific), if you're a Japanese or anime aficionado like me, turning on the Japanese dub on Sonic games is a no brainer, but unfortunately that's an option most players will not even consider since they will just take the ENG dub and be done with it. Had SEGA put more care into localizing properly the character into the west, including a much better quality control with dubbing, I'm pretty sure the idea of Sonic being mute would have never come to be, or at worst would have been part of a minority group.

At the very least, I'm sure Classic Sonic being mute in Generations wouldn't have been a thing.

#sonic the hedgehog #classic sonic #opinion

10 notes · View notes