I think I heard somewhere before that somewhere between the turn of the century, Sonic started acting cool rather being cool. My take is that he used to always tried too hard to be cool, and I loved the hell out of it when he did.

What I hate about modern Sonic is that it's ashamed of it's cheesy 90s roots while also trying extremely hard to pander towards that 90s nostalgia.

Look at Crash. Modern Crash is embracing it's 90s roots and is now bigger than Sonic ever was in the past decade. I think Sega should learn from that. Not just with Sonic, but all the other franchises they left behind as well.

Yakuza and Puyo Puyo still manage to be great. There are clearly people who know what they are doing at Sega. Someone in management just needs to wake up.

This. Sonic has survived its flops not by hiding from the cheesiness, but embracing it. It survived because it accepted its own absurdity and wasn’t afraid to keep playing it straight.

Neo era Sonic’s jabs are funny, sure, but they’re too afraid of failure to take themselves seriously again. This can be seen somewhat in the lack of Supersonic finale: in itself it is a minor nitpick, but Super Sonic was a gameplay change that signaled a truly dire straight: a moment where Sonic would be willing to admit that he needs to go all out to finish this fight. That’s why Forces failed: we saw Sonic Lose, yet he still didn’t take anything seriously. In Sa2, to contrast, Sonic was able to joke, while still recognizing that this was life and death (and in the “Last Time on Sa2” mini journals before each mission, Sonic spends at least one briefly wondering whether breaking out of prison means he really is a criminal, which is an unusually sober take from him)