[quote=@DarkwolfX37]
<Snipped quote by Etcetera>

GOOD.
And yes, exactly. Forces has the chance to fix the canon lines but even that's gonna take some fuckery since Generations didn't use Nega and he's the only one other than Blaze to travel both time and dimensions, and if they do what they should and literally make 2d a 2d dimension that was only 3d at all in the 3d dimension then they can set things up really well. Though overworlds have been the bane of every game since A1 that had them. 06, Unleashed... Hell the version of Unleashed with an overworld isn't worth playing even though Unleashed is a good game. 
[/quote]

But they've proven that overworlds can work. SA1 is a mixed bag for most people (I really liked it), but everyone likes the Sonic Jam overworld. You have the Sonic Utopia, the fan made open world Sonic game that everyone really likes (also Sonic Robo Blast). They even managed to put Sonic in Zelda for the Sonic Lost World DLC (which, granted, is more of an open-world style rather than an overworld, but the two are similar enough to lump together). The problem is that every game that attempted the overworld after SA1 was a bad game in general, which isn't directly tied to the overworld itself.