>>332683
The good examples you show there all look "drawn normal" to me. They're so hi-res it doesn't look like "pixels," it looks like someone just drew what they wanted, no longer constrained by Sega Genesis hardware limitations. They're all sprites. Skullgirls is also sprites. Unless Skullgirls pulls some NES boss trickery where the big characters are actually moving background layers or whatever, but you know what I mean.
>>332685
>There's cities and ruins on South Island too
Ruins, sure. Cities? Spring Yard is clearly a junkyard, and Star Light and Scrap Brain are clearly Eggman's base. Now, don't get me wrong, until recently, I just figured Eggman built a casino in Sonic 2 as well, but when I realized Sonic 2 is the same island as Sonic Adventure, and Sonic Adventure clearly (and sometimes explicitly) features locations from previous games, I thought that was cool. I'm counting it. Does it stray slightly into headcanon territory? Perhaps. But the two games are the same island and they both have a casino with Sonic's name and image all over it, so I'm saying they're the same casino.
>where the emeralds could also be found through the special stages in it. It never clarified on which island Station Square takes place in so I considered it to be on its own neighboring landmass,
The plot of Sonic 2 explicitly says that the island, Westside Island, is the "original" home of the emeralds. It's acknowledging that they were somewhere else in Sonic 1, but retconning it so that they were moved there at some point, and Westside Island is where they were originally from. Sonic Adventure then also takes place on the island where the emeralds were originally from, so therefore it's Westside Island, from Sonic 2.
>later games like SA2 and Shadow having their own maps, the presence of a "Central City"
Those maps don't make clear where Station Square is in relation to locations from those games. I'm open to the idea that Station Square isn't a city, but is, as its name implies, just a square in a larger city, but it's never actually made explicit or even really hinted if that's the case. It would be convenient to say Station Square is in Central City, but they never say that.
Well there is a map in Sonic Chronicles, and Station Square is on it, but that map doesn't match anything else in the series, so I wouldn't lose sleep over it. I wouldn't take its placements as diehard canon.
>Tails Tube trying to explain the previous two worlds thing as just humans inhabiting the larger continents with the anthros preferring more remote islands.
I wouldn't even count Tails Tube or other things like interviews or whatever as canon. However, yes, I always thought this was obvious, and it always bugged me when people didn't get it. The games make very explicit what's going on, and that "two worlds" thing was an offhand remark made by a guy who doesn't care about the story, which was then translated, and even when translated, doesn't have to be interpreted as "two dimensions." Adventure and other games rely heavily on being the same world as the previous games. It's very simple, and all these other things overcomplicate it.
>It also might be a difference in medium but Sonic and his friends don't go Super nearly as often as Z Saiyans do post Frieza.
Yeah I'd chalk that up to difference in medium. But also, I wouldn't say it matters.
Also, Silver is deliberately Trunks. Amy is (Kid) Chi Chi. And the only reason to say Shadow isn't Vegeta is because that's such a common anime archetype that it appears in practically every anime. My point remains, Sonic is and should be a shonen anime. Flynn and especially Stanley need to learn that. But the very fact that Flynn had to be forced to stop using Penders characters, then the Freedom Fighters, and even then, replaced them all with new OCs instead of actually making game characters the main characters, shows that he will never learn.
>>332691
I did explicitly say that sprites, which are inherently made of pixels, are better in 2D gameplay. Obviously I don't mean two dimensional art, which is all made of pixels, is bad. It was quite obvious that I meant making big fake pixels at lower resolutions than you need to is bad. Trying to pretend you're on older hardware is usually stupid. Just actually make it for the old hardware, and we'll talk. Sonic Mania should have released a 32X version, then I'd like it better.