Every Sonic game is a roll of the dice. Passion for the game you want to play can easily mean reacting to the newest big hit… several years later… without the underlying processes which shaped that hit. Sometimes it’s Sonic Adventure trying to outdo Mario 64. Sometimes it’s Sonic '06 trying to outdo Mario Sunshine.

The real issue is that every project falls short of its vision. Every single one. Sometimes by degrees, sometimes by a mile. So if the goal is simply to be what another project already is, you are guaranteed to be worse than that project. Your thing has to shoot far ahead of that target in order to be its own thing.

This is why Nintendo’s “blue ocean” strategy keeps working, more often than not. They don’t want to make the latest and fanciest [blank]. When you compete, you can lose. They want to be the only company that offers a thing. Some stupid gimmick gets diddled with until it’s the germ of a whole-ass game. Sometimes that starts from a series, like “let’s do another Zelda” or “let’s do another Mario Kart.” But a ton of their titles have branding applied later in development, when the shell of a game is already fun to dork around in, and they pick an IP to shape how everything looks and sounds. Half the Yoshi and Kirby games are like that. Kirby himself is an ascended stand-in. Sakurai made a little blob guy early on, and it was so cute and expressive that he just stuck with it. The character’s design process was so freeform that Miyamoto didn’t know he was pink until he saw the box art.

It can work, everyone loved Squid Game, so you’d presumably find many talents to work on it. Corporation wanting to make money on it doesn’t really change the quality. So it all boils down to management - if the management’s gonna suck, so will the games.