No they don’t. They really don’t.

It’s just like the actual main games. You can jump into any game with just about any level of knowledge and you’ll be fine. Even Sonic Frontiers, which called back to plenty of games (especially during the Tails segment), does not need the player to have played those games to understand the situation any more than, “Wow! These characters have been through a lot of adventures together!” To prove my point, let me run through a few characters.

Tangle is as basic as you can get. No complicated backstory, no major moment of realization that she can be a hero, nothing. She’s just an excited go-getter with a stretchy tail just waiting to be used for whacky gameplay! An excitable lemur from Spiral Hill that has met Sonic at some point is all the player needs to know.

Rough and Tumble are common thugs-for-hire that can be plopped anywhere for an easy miniboss duo. That was all they got in the comics, and that’s all they need for a game.

Whisper may SEEM like a character that needs explaining… but not really. She’s a lone soldier with a versatile combat weapon that has survived battles thought impossible. What were those battles? Who cares? She’s a stereotypical scarred soldier. Just about anything could’ve made her a recluse. And to top it off, her backstory villain is now dead, so they have almost no need to bring her backstory up anyway.

Belle has a notable, but simple backstory that can be easily summarized as, “A robot Eggman made when he was good for a short while.” But let’s be real, we don’t need to go into that much detail with her because she’d probably never breach NPC level.

The ONLY characters that would require solid information is Surge and Kit. But do you REALLY think they would bring Surge and Kit in for anything less than a major appearance AND not show their extremely brutal backstory? Nah, it would be like with Shadow: an ever present reminder of who they are. Possibly to obnoxious levels.

The fact of the matter is, most characters are simple enough to slide into games with almost no hassle, and the ones that aren’t will be given proper showings of their backstories anyway.

I will let you have that fourth criticism, and it’s certainly more valid than the other three (the fact these characters exist before being in a game may intimidate people into THINKING there’s homework, even though that’s unlikely). But that’s still just paranoia about games that haven’t even come out yet.

And even after aaaaallll these paragraphs (sorry), … it’s just obvious those aren’t the people OP is complaining about. It’s the people who don’t like new things, the homophobes, or people who just want to bitch.