>expands Eggmanland into it's own country
<while Eggman sits around and does nothing
I get your point though.
Writing with Sonic games from that era was always kinda blah though. At least you could say with the adventure games that they had a sort of "cheese" factor, combined with the wonky early 3d facial animations and terrible dialogue reading, that made them more tolerable as sort of a "so bad it's good" kind of way. Once they started going the route of having sonic hamfist sarcastic quips at literally everything starting with Colors, that's when things went REALLY south IMO. Like I really REALLY hate the writing for Sonic Lost World. They could have handled the "sonic teams with eggman" thing a hell of a lot better than what they did with Tails acting like a little bitch and getting jealous and shit.
I think an underappreciated aspect of the Adventure era games, especially the two Adventure games themselves, that made people like them was that the plots for them actually has a lot of momentum, twists and turns, and immediate consequences of what just happened. There's something the South Park writers said somewhere about how they like to avoid "and then this happened" writing, and instead go for "
but then this happened". It's a bit of an oversimplification, but it gets their point across that they want each plot point to be a direct response to or complication of the previous plot point, and not just things happening as they need to to get the plot from point A to point B, and I think it'll get my point across when it comes to Sonic games.
The Adventure games follow that "but then" structure more.
Eggman breaks into the GUN base to find his grandfather's secret weapon, but it turns out to be Shadow who tells Eggman to come to the Ark with Chaos Emeralds. Shadows goes off and steals one Emerald, but this causes the police to go after Sonic. Sonic evades the police and finds Shadow, but Shadow reveals his Chaos Control and Sonic gets arrested. Eggman meets with Shadow and gets shown the Eclipse Cannon, but they'll need to team up with Rouge and invade Alcatraz Island to get the Chaos Emeralds to power it. Tails and Amy go to Alcatraz to rescue Sonic, but run into Eggman, causing complications for both groups. Rouge gets the Chaos Emeralds, but gets trapped inside the base, causing Shadow to have to race to rescue her. Sonic is freed and runs into Shadow, but has to cut the showdown short because the island is about to blow up and both sides need to hurry up to escape. And so on.
I would say Sonic 06 also tries to follow a good structure, but it's messily written (mainly the Sonic story; the Shadow story is good and the Silver story is mostly fine). I would even say Shadow tries to follow this, it's just awkward and scatterbrained because of the non-linear structure which can sometimes lead you to changing gears to something that has nothing do with what Shadow was doing in previous levels. I would also say Black Knight is mostly good, it's just short.
But other games tend to do this thing where stuff happens at the start to set up the premise, and then most of the game is just "and then Sonic went to another place, and then Sonic beat up this boss, and then Sonic got another McGuffin, and then Sonic..." with maybe some banter mixed in until you reach the final stretch and the story's third act finally kicks in and wraps up. I think even Frontiers suffers from this for a lot of the game, if just because the way they accomidated for the pseudo-open world structure was for the story to be super lethargic.
I think you could argue Lost World and Forces have a more "but then" story where stuff actually happens, but the problem is those games' stories suck for other reasons. Mainly Pontac and Graff being completely unable to write anything serious, and the new villains being lame. And Lost World's plot is really slow because the gameplay has the same Kirby-like structure that Colors also has (which feels weirdly not Sonic-like to me), where there's a few regions and each region has 4 or 5 levels and a boss, and plot only happens between regions.
