>>190238
>it's quite fun for what it is
I just finished watching the first season at your recommendation and I don't agree with that. There is some fun to be had in the show, but I was continually uninterested and only rarely found something that made me laugh or smile. I wouldn't recommend the show to anyone but the most die-hard Sonic fan, and even then you could probably find something on FanFiction.net that would stimulate you in the same was as Sonic Prime.
The actual premise is that Sonic and his pals (which includes Rouge, for some reason) are fighting Eggman over a big crystal called the Paradox Prism. Sonic arrives slightly late to the fight and leaps in just as Eggman tries to wrench the crystal free from its rock, which causes Sonic to go falling through dimensions. He winds up in an alternate Green Hill Zone ruled by industrial Eggman robots where everyone is downtrodden and miserable, but also meets some alternate universe versions of his friends: Rouge and Knuckles are rebels, Amy is a killbot cyborg totally loyal to Eggman, Tails is a cynical guy named Nine with seven mechanical tails/arms who accounts for 90% of the edge in the setting.
Anyway, there are two main problems: the premise isn't earned and the animation isn't very good. The premise feels like something I would have seen on TV when I was a kid, where all the different shows on Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon crossed over for a big event - or perhaps something like the two-part and three-part story arcs/movies from Jimmy Neutron or My Life as a Teenage Robot.
Obviously, there isn't much of a point in having a crossover or "what if?" story if there's no foundation to compare the alternate realities to, and that's what I kept recalling whenever Sonic would get shunted to a new world or we'd cut back to something happening a few minutes before the initial crystal shattering. We spend so much time in the industrial Eggman world that it begins to feel like home, but of course Sonic's goal at the end of all this will be go to back to his home in . . . where, exactly? Video game Green Hill Zone but with a weird 3D art style? If the video games are his home, why is Rouge hanging out with the good guys and doing absolutely nothing.
It turns out my comparison to an old TV show is apt, because the quality of the animation really does remind me of shows like Code Lyoko or Cubix (am I dating myself yet?). I'm not exaggerating when I say there is almost no camera movement, which makes a lot of action scenes feel very static. The robots don't actually deform/fall apart when they're destroyed in all but a few scenes, and every 3D model looks very sterile. There are so many recycled animations: all the Eggman robots jog forward and fly forward in lockstep; when we see Shadow and Sonic racing, Shadow has exactly one skating animation which is reused even in situations where he should be reacting to what Sonic is doing. Rouge's wing membranes are obviously just physics particles tugged around by the "fingers" (membranous wings on an anthro character's back are kind of weird, now that I think about it), so they flap around without catching the wind - which is the entire point of how wings work. It looks horrendously cheap and never looks as though Rouge is actually moving in the air, even accounting for cartoon logic.
There are these odd textures on Sonic and Shadow's head, too. I think they're meant to look like an uneven surface, like a physical thing would have, but they just look like little lines of paint that Sonic flicked onto his head that morning. It's so strange to think of all the money that must have gone into designing, creating, and animating these 3D models, only for them to look incredibly out of date at best and uncanny at worst. Most of the action is like old syndicated cartoons as well, with lots of shots that make you wonder where a character came from, or why the evil robots with lasers aren't just shooting the heroes to death all the time.
The best action scene occurred in the caveman world, when that world's Amy is planning to use the crystal macguffin shard to do something bad. Sonic is trying to catch up to her as she rides on her pet chocobo pink bird running through an overgrown forest. Sonic can't get up to speed because there's too much overgrowth, and whenever she smacks the ground with her crystal macguffin hammer, a new tree or vine sprouts up. There's a push and pull to the scene that is genuinely really engaging, as the two of them jockey for position and attack each other. There's another action scene involving the group jumping down an improbably tall stairwell in the industrial Eggman base and having to stop and go up and down stairs as new robots and threats appear, but it overstays its welcome.
Really, the whole series is extremely crowded. There are just too many characters to manage, and most of the worlds have a very predictable story structure:
>sonic arrives and goes WHOA DUDE a lot
>one of sonic's friends appears as a friendly/evil face
>sonic eats a chili dog/bemoans not having any chili dogs
>sonic learns of the crystal macguffin shard located in that world
>sonic teams up with his newfound friends/enemies
And from there nothing exciting really happens. The only exception is the industrial Eggman world at the start, because we spend a lot of time there throughout the season. As I said, that place is what actually feels like home because the rest of the characters and worlds are static and uninteresting.
In Summary
Sonic Prime would be a decent 3-part series finale to a TV show that aired 20 years ago (which, for those of you keeping track at home, is the year 2003, not 1993). Rouge isn't sexy, the characters feel scatterbrained, and the animation is extremely dated despite what was doubtless a large budget. I can fathom a guess where that budget went, at least: the show has no fewer than sixteen producers, not counting the production company itself. I might pay attention to the second season a few months after it airs, but I certainly am not looking forward to it.
>>190217
This proved true in the fullest sense. There are several different Rouges in Sonic Prime, not one of which lives up to her identity as a femme fatale thief. She's just a girl who hangs out with Sonic and the rest of the gang and can fly (except when it would undercut the tension of the scene, in which case she doesn't fly and thus looks like an idiot). The only fanart/porn I've seen of her Prime design is referencing how she obviously resembles the recipient of a double mastectomy because the censors at Netflix hate looking at boobs.