What if the Sonic Renaissance never took off?

Nowadays, we live in a practical golden age of Sonic media. With the success of the Sonic Movie trilogy and the success of the most recent 3D Sonic games, it seems that Sonic has finally found its footing as well as a newly found popularity. But if the history of the Sonic series has taught us anything, is that it could’ve easily gone another way.

So what if it did do the other way? What if the Sonic Renaissance that we see today never took off?

Say that, despite the backlash to the original trailer, the original Sonic Movie design was kept and while the film still performs decently well financially, it’s critical and audience praise takes a significant hit when compared to our timeline and a sequel never gets greenlit.

Kishimoto is never able to convince SEGA to delay the launch of Sonic Frontiers and the game comes out in 2021 as a complete rush job similar to the infamous Sonic 06. Ian Flynn is also never brought on to write the story which leads to the story itself being similarly rushed with many story criticisms from previous games being prevalent in the alternate story of Frontiers.

With faith in the series at an all time low, SEGA and Sonic Team decide to remaster Sonic Generations in order to restore some semblance of good will towards the Sonic franchise. However, much like how Frontiers ended up as an 06 style rush job, the Generations remaster ends up being incredibly glitchy and unpolished to the same extent as Sonic Colours Ultimate with the Shadow Campaign ultimately being scrapped due to time constraints.

With this, the Sonic series is essentially back to where it was after the release of Forces. The franchise’s big effort to bring itself back into the spotlight ultimately failed miserably and there’s no clear direction for where the series is gonna go next. How do you think the Sonic series would change going forward?