If by "woke" you mean "a generation of embarrassingly mad 30something dorks said anime intros was bad and now we can't have fun" :)

This is the wrong answer on the internet, people loooooove the buttrock from the Daytona USA Championship Edition vocalist and Jun Senoue. They have the sauce. Nobody was asking for Shadow the Hedgehog specifically, but Sonic Team went and did it and we should be thankful imo that Sega ever let their mascot engage in such sincere silliness.

Sonic in general does.

TRUTH NUKE although everyone should know this tbh.

It should've been City Escape in the opening city scene as soon as they jumped from the helicopter

The corollary to this is that all of the vocal themes for the games of the 2010s are almost universally bad......... Sega why...

They didn't exactly eject Toyoma Ohtani despite his leading the sound team on that game... I do agree though that the 2006 was kind of the beginning of the end, because it was ammo for the type of people who hated what Sonic games had become since the Dreamcast's launch. Which is sad...

I really want Frontiers to be a full return to form for Sonic but I'm tryna keep my expectations way down.

And here's where I learn that Un-gravitify is 19 years old

The spinoff games sometimes have chill themes, Free from Sonic Free Riders is okay too.

I played like five hours of Forces, and per my other comment

The corollary to this is that all of the vocal themes for the games of the 2010s are almost universally bad......... Sega why...

I keep hearing about Frontiers but it's not a 2010s Sonic game and also doesn't have a kickass intro. I'm ready for it to be cool though. I recall the lawsuit, I thought it got settled at some point but we're never getting Johnny Gioeli again are we

Not reeeeeally? The game is hugely oversold online, pitched as being a great story but it has maaaybe ten cutscenes tops? It is better to play than Secret Rings, but the onrails sword combat is still kind of bad. It's over in under five hours if you're good though. I think if you miss the 4kids voice cast, or more broadly when Sonic was 'cringe and anime' it might be an okay afternoon. It has less charm than Adventure 2 and less brave ambition than Shadow '05.

I really liked it when it came out. A lot of Sonic games get lost in the sauce trying to do too much, but BK is in the camp of "do one thing decently well for a decently long campaign". The English voice acting grates on me in the worst way but you can set it to Japanese so that stops being an issue fast, plus if the gameplay clicks for you iirc there's a ton of side content to play. My general take is that Sonic games are better than people give them credit for and I think SatBK is a solid 7/10

Fair, I wasn't really into All Stars Racing or Transformed and Crossworlds' crossover stuff didn't grab me either, Idk.