For a long time, Sonic The Hedgehog games have been very rough to produce. Even as early as the third game, deadlines meant that it had to be split into two parts. Sonic X-Treme had tons of crunch put into it's development, to the point it caused health issues for its leads which ironically caused the cancellation of the game. Things got worse in the mid 2000's, in which between Shadow The Hedgehog and Sonic & The Black Knight, not a single game didn't have huge development issues or massive caveats that poorly affected reception. There was a brief hope with Sonic Colours and Generations being more focused games, but Lost World's generic and poorly explained design choices, the attempt of Forces to try way too many different things at once (failing at most), and Frontiers being a step in the right direction but feeling overall undercooked has soured a lot of opinions on the series. 

It's not just games developed by Sonic Team, either. Sonic Boom: Rise Of Lyric, Sonic Colours Ultimate and Sonic Origins all had numerous glitches and other issues at launch, many of which were not fixed. The latter 2 were remasters of largely pre-existing code, making it all the more confusing that they launched in those states.

In 2022, the same year Frontiers came out, a second live action movie from Paramount Pictures came out to large acclaim and even greater financial success. Comics published by IDW and toys from Jakks Pacific were continuing as well as they had for several years, maybe even better thanks to the movies. An animated series called Sonic Prime will debut on Netflix about a month after this is written. No other medium has had quite the controversy as video games, even though that's where Sonic came from.

I don't know exactly who to blame, maybe it's someone inside Sonic Team, maybe it's a board of executives at Sega, maybe there's some other force doing it, but someone is forcing the development of Sonic games to not get enough time, people, money, or a combination of all 3. Whatever the case, both Frontiers and Forces share an annoyingly high number of references to a select few areas from the original games (namely Green Hill and Chemical Plant), a severe lack of challenge even on the hardest difficulty, and way too many instances of the games being made worse for the sake of satisfying executive demands. Do I also need to mention that both of these games came after development cycles that feel way too long for what they achieved?

In short, I'm annoyed at how Sonic games have been handled this past decade. I don't know what needs to happen, but management of this franchise needs to change, and the steps they have taken in the past to rectify this are clearly not working much if at all. I'm tired of the repeated insistence that Sega is focusing on quality over quantity when they have not shown evidence for that being the case.