askchapo

IMO the thing is that Sonic at its best only appeals to a small slice of gamers. Like if you talk to speedrunners about it they'll have nothing but good things to say about it, and in general Sonic games get more cathartic to play the better you get as a player. The less time you spend bumping into things and the more confidently you can navigate the precision platforming segments the more you can just zone out and enjoy the flow state and the music and stuff.

But you've got to have a personality that leads you to playing levels multiple times to get into that flow state, and a lot of people who don't have that will play a Sonic game, struggle through every level exactly once, and then put it away and declare that it sucked.

So this niche interest game got put up against Mario, which is superficially similar but much, much better at appealing to a mass audience, and the comparison has stuck in the culture ever since. People who like it continue to like it but because of its high profile and nostalgia factor lots and lots of people play it who don't like it and that infects the discourse for it in a way that it doesn't for other games.

...and of course lots of the games really do suck because SEGA and Sonic Team have had a bad habit of rushing games out the door before they were finished that goes back to the Mega Drive days.

As an unreformed sonic enjoyer I think this is the case. The abstract concept of a sonic game is so much more enjoyable than the material reality of a sonic game