The Sonic series has had a lot of polarizing characters over the years, and across a lot of media. But within the main games, there are few characters who divide the fanbase as much as Amy Rose. Despite being with the series since Sonic CD, she’s usually seen as a later addition, about on par with her friend Cream the Rabbit at best, or with annoyances like Marine the Raccoon at worst.
Her negative qualities as a character are usually overblown. She isn't that bad in the grand scheme of things. However, she does have problems as a character, and plenty of times that made fans groan and wish they could skip her scenes. Here’s just five of those moments.
5 All Hedgehogs Look The Same
This one is kind of funny. Whenever the series introduced a new hedgehog, Amy was there to race in and glomp them like an anime convention fan in the 2000s. She did it to Shadow in Sonic Adventure 2, then to Silver in Sonic ‘06. That’s despite the fact neither look like Sonic. Shadow is black, and Silver is white and silver, hence the names. At least she's not the only one, as everyone in Sonic Adventure 2 outside the main cast suffered the same issue in confusing Sonic for Shadow.
Silver is harder to understand since, color notwithstanding, his quills are pretty distinctive from the other two (video game reviewer SomeCallMeJohnny referred to him as a “literal pothead”). The one time she did get it right was in Sonic Unleashed when Sonic was in his Werehog form. She still thought she made a mistake because he looked so different. So, she just apologized and left him as is. It’s probably the only time Sonic felt bad about missing out on a cuddle from Amy Rose.
4 Running Into Trouble
Maybe Amy Rose's love affects her the same way hairstyle-based insults affect Josuke Higashikata in Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: it makes them literally blind with emotion. But while Josuke's rage makes him a force to be reckoned with, Amy's hedgehog-fueled love for blue speedsters just gets her into trouble. It’s been one of her defining traits since her debut.
In Sonic CD’s Palmtree Panic Zone, Amy Rose appears and tails Sonic’s trail. If the player stops Sonic before the goal, she’ll latch onto him and a bunch of hearts with fly out of her. Then, at the start of Collision Chaos Zone 1, she’ll do the same until Metal Sonic bursts out from the side of the screen, grabs her, and flies off. It shows self-preservation is a distant second on Amy’s list of priorities.
3 Get Married Or Get Smashed
Sonic Heroes, Metacritic's 7th best Sonic game, aimed to be lighter than its predecessor, Sonic Adventure 2. But it still needed boss battles, and some of those bosses were fighting other teams. Thus, Team Rose (Amy, Cream, and Big the Cat) had to fight Team Sonic (Sonic, Tails, Knuckles). But then the developers had to think of a reason why they’d fight. They are all good guys after all, so it’s not like their goals conflict each other.
Cream and Big are just after their missing Chao and frog friends respectively. But Amy wants to achieve her one big goal; marry Sonic. If she beats him up, he has to settle down with her. Even her in-battle quotes have a worrying tone to them (“Sonic, give up! This time you’re mine!”). Sega’s often crossed the line between crushing on someone and being a stalker with Amy Rose. This is a big leap across it.
2 Over-Training
After Sega stopped supporting the Dreamcast to focus on other platforms, they found their biggest base audience in their old rival Nintendo. Case in point; Sonic Battle. It was a pseudo-3D fighting game made for the Game Boy Advance. The game was somewhat inspired by Super Smash Bros, in that it’s a multiplayer brawler with platforms. But it had its own style of gameplay that made Sonic the Fighters look like Street Fighter 3: Third Strike by comparison. In other words, it wasn’t very good.
But it did have a story mode! In it, Amy Rose takes up boxercise to keep fit and make her a contender against the other characters. Once she discovers it’s making her lose weight, she overdoes it to lose even more weight. All so she can look nicer for Sonic. It even makes her sick, leading her to fight hallucinations of Sonic and their friends. It sounds like something from the cover of old 1960s Lois Lane comics than the early 2000s.
1 Devotion Becomes Obsession
Back in Sonic ’06, Amy Rose helps Silver look for the ‘Iblis Trigger’; a figure who’ll cause the end of the world. She doesn’t know that this ‘trigger’ is Sonic, and that she’s inadvertently helping the time-traveling telekinetic to attack her crush. But that’s not the dumb part. After Silver fights Sonic, Amy Rose steps in to help. She gives Sonic time to get away, while Silver pleads his case. He’s sure Sonic has to be stopped because he’ll destroy the world somehow. She responds by saying “If I had to choose between the world and Sonic, I would choose Sonic!”
Instead of sounding devoted, it sounds more like she doesn’t care about who Sonic is and what he does. She just wants to be with him because her emotions depend on it. Like even if Sonic became a complete, world-destroying villain like Silver thinks he is, she’d still stick with him because she’s emotionally dependent on him. Which fits her characterization in the previous games, and that’s not a good message to send.
Granted, that’s thinking a little too hard for a series about cartoon hedgehogs. But if Sonic Team thought more about their games’ stories, and Amy Rose in general, she’d be a much more popular character with fans.