When video game franchises have been spanning multiple decades, how they attempt to reach out to older fans becomes important, but the Sonic the Hedgehog games are facing similar issues in this area, including Scarlet and Violet and Sonic Frontiers. More often than not, these franchises are quick to harken back to the very earliest installments, leaving fans who are still nostalgic but slightly younger in the dark, and this is something both series have been doing for around a decade or so.
At first, the issues might seem more egregious with the Sonic franchise, but both series have surprisingly similar fates. Generations and Mania were both nostalgic throwback Sonic titles, but Pokémon games have been getting remade since FireRed and LeafGreen came out in 2004, originally to modernize the 8-bit Pokémon games that couldn't hold up years later. HeartGold and SoulSilver, as well as Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, also take advantage of nostalgia, but add enough new content to keep things from feeling too stale and samey. All of these games are great, but pave the way for later behavior that leads to the franchises getting stuck in a rut.
Sonic and Pokémon Both Focus Too Much On Their Pasts
Excluding Sonic Lost World which came out in 2013, Green Hill Zone has appeared in every mainline Sonic game for the past 12 years, as well as countless spin-offs. In Frontiers, it’s a large part of the Cyber Space stages, and for no real reason. Those stages detract from the fact that Sonic Frontiers might be considered a series classic in a few years. The Pokémon: Let’s Go games were the second round of remakes of the Kanto games. No Pokémon from outside the Kanto region other than regionals and the Meltan line could be transferred into the game, not even newer evolutions of older Kanto Pokémon like Crobat, Rhyperior, and five of Eevee’s eight evolutions.
Kanto Pokémon have often received preferential treatment throughout the history of the Pokémon series, but Charizard especially is the poster child for this. Its two counterparts, Venusaur, and Blastoise were not in the Galar Pokédex and are not even available through transfer in Scarlet and Violet, and yet Charizard is in Gen 9's Pokédex. Kanto’s Fire-type starter was also the only one of this trio to receive two Mega Evolutions in X and Y. Charizard favoritism and Green Hill Zone’s prevalence are both issues of the same problem, appealing to long-time fans of the franchise, but only an increasingly small number of them.
There are people now in their mid-20s who grew up playing Sonic Adventure, Adventure 2, and Sonic Heroes. Likewise, many adult fans of Pokémon started with Ruby and Sapphire or Diamond and Pearl. Although Diamond and Pearl got remade last year and Legends was also set in the Sinnoh region before it got that name, this much attention for a non-Kanto region was an exception, not a rule. Most of these classic games are sidelined in favor of older entries in the series, despite the argument that Heroes is the best Sonic the Hedgehog game, and perhaps more deserving of acknowledgment compared to the series' clunky first game.
Every game is someone’s first, so focusing on older entries comes at the expense of the many other players who are too young to those older titles being released in the first place. The Mario series pulls from its entire history in most of its titles, as does the Kirby series. Why Pokémon and Sonic the Hedgehog are so fixated on their first entries is difficult to say, but it’s something that the games after Scarlet and Violet and Sonic Frontiers should try to fix.
