These Three Sonic Games Are Still Gold (and These Ones Aren’t)

Turns out, Japanese Felix the Cat mixes well with Aztec ruins and space cannons. Not so much with sword fights and metal music, though.

CONTENT WARNING!

This post contains sensitive material that may not be suitable for all readers. The material in question includes:

- Bad language
- Mental health topics (autism, grief, etc.)
- Frightening imagery
- Graphic violence
- Flashing imagery (for the epileptic)
- Sexual and suggestive content

Selective Favoritism
Sonic Adventure DX (Positive Example #1)
Sonic Adventure 2: Battle (Positive Example #2)
Sonic Heroes (Positive Example #3)
The Meh-Factor
Shadow the Hedgehog (Negative Example #1)
Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 (Negative Example #2)
Sonic Storybook Series (Negative Example #3)
A Maverick Among Fans

Selective Favoritism

My adult brain’s still in a knot trying to comprehend the notion that I used to see my cousins every Thanksgiving…

…and for reference, I didn’t think you were expecting to see the opening paragraph start out this way when you clicked the link to this post. That’s not to say it isn’t an appropriate starting point, however, as this is how my history with today’s subject matter began. Out of a twelve-child Catholic household (the ’60s were a different time), my mom’s sister Terry ended up having a family of her own, the Magnottis, who’ve certainly made up the bulk of my most colorful relatives. While I want to say there were very early instances taking place at either my Aunt Jen’s or Uncle Dennis’s, it was an ongoing tradition for Terry and company to cruise up north from Virginia and visit us in Pennsylvania every Turkey Day. In between watching seventy hours of ESPN, they just so happened to waltz in at the start of one week-long vacation with technology from another planet: two popular forms of new-fangled brain junk called a Nintendo 64 and a Nintendo GameCube. Sure, I joined them in playing the original N64 Super Smash Bros. on several occasions—some of which were definitely at Jen’s or Dennis’s—but it took a lot to control Samus Aran with a hand-sized spaceship for a controller, so I gave the GameCube a try to see if my tiny autistic hands could handle it better. Sure enough, they could, and while I did spend many an afternoon gazing at the duking muscular bodies of hulking alien weirdos in Dragon Ball Z: Budokai (none of which resulted in me taking interest in the show), Magnotti cousins like David, Michael, and Jessie agreed to insert a disc for something called a Sonic Adventure DX: Director’s Cut, a title that contained too many words for it to even register with me.

What transpired from there was a rollercoaster ride of comforting emotions.

The game hit me like a freight train, combining a unique rock soundtrack, retro character models, and wonderfully utopian environments to form a welcoming atmosphere all around—one that quickly became another in a line of positive hyper-fixations. Within the hour (just so you’re aware, I was a goddamn five-year-old at the time), I’d squashed the liquid body of the vengeful deity Chaos at the start of slick yet wholesome Sonic’s story, earning my way into a hotel’s pool area in a city called Station Square and leaving me mystified at the possibility of unlocking the five other playable characters. Of course, its lack of multiplayer kind of threw a monkey wrench into the likelihood of playing the game again on the Magnottis’ system, not to mention that was both before they stopped visiting altogether and well before my immediate family hauled ass out of Pennsylvania.

After finally getting a GameCube of my own at the Exton Square Mall’s GameStop, I made sure to stock up on worthless shovelware like Pokémon that my sister only played for a good five minutes and revered masterpieces like Shrek: Extra Large that we inexplicably sat through for tens of hours more (and before you ask, the part about Pokémon and Shrek: Extra Large was one hundred percent sarcasm, minus our playtime with either game.) More than anything, though, I made sure to buy every available Sonic game for the system, like “Sonic DX” and “Sonic Adventure Battle 2″—as my true Sonic historian family used to call them—as well as a colorful little gem called Sonic Heroes. Little did I know that these three critically hit-or-miss 3D platformers would become some of my all-time favorite games as much for their dazzling creativity as for general nostalgia.

Okay, there are clear cutoff points where my “Definitive Childhood Sonic Trilogy” began and ended, but we’ll get to my feelings toward the rest of the franchise a little later. I just feel like expressing my adoration for the good ones first.

Sonic Adventure DX (Positive Example #1)

Ironically, out of the first three games I ever played—Super Smash Bros., Dragon Ball Z: Budokai, and Sonic Adventure DX—the one to truly reel me in was the only one that lacked multiplayer. Then again, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t warranted, given the whirlwind of emotions it gave me, as I mentioned previously. Because I felt this so strongly at the time, it surely has more to do with autism than the amount of nostalgia that admittedly infects it to this day.

This is in no way easy to explain to someone who’s never played the game, but elements like the fuzzy default menu narrator’s voice clips, the blue sky background of the main menu, the upbeat rock theme of the character select menu, the colorful playable characters with their movesets and personalities on display from the start, the cheerful cosmopolitan guitar background theme of Station Square, and countless others carried such a level of harmonic beauty that flooded me with an at times overwhelming sense of comfort early on, even when nothing consequential was happening. This continued on with the retro charm of Dr. Eggman lacking a moving mouth as he belted out his first evil laugh, Sonic’s iconic “You’re gonna crash!” face, and the tropical serenity of Emerald Coast.

To further add to the randomness of this emotional connection, the specific notes and instrumental tracks used in the act two theme of Emerald Coast—somehow more so than those of act one’s theme—stimulated the pleasure centers of my brain in a way that drove my enjoyment all on its own, and I of course mean the wholesome pleasure centers. This profound, borderline surreal and meditative experience continued throughout the rest of the game, from Tikal’s supportive tutorial offerings to E-102 Gamma’s surprisingly somber theme song during the end credits to his story.

“The wind is making an invisible path. Don’t be afraid—go through the gate!”

– The spirit ball of a dead echidna. How come that sounds so weird?

Granted, this game carries an impressive quality that the rest of the games in this trilogy do, which is that I can still appreciate it from a creative and narrative perspective as an adult. Ultimately, none of these games’ writing is outstanding—mainly due to a troublesome tendency for over-explaining and the fact that none of the characters are among my all-time favorites—but it actually surpasses the writing of even classic platformer powerhouses (these games even surpass said powerhouses in a number of other areas, as this game’s camera controls are far more responsive than those of Super Mario 64, although people are still willing to complain about this game’s and not Mario 64‘s because it’s okay when the latter game has a shit camera.) Several of the characters grow and change, the villain’s plot is well thought-out and executed, and the backstory is shockingly deep and turbulent.

I will say that its sequel does a damn fine job of streamlining the story structure since this game, however, as each of the six playable characters (plus Super Sonic) having their own separate storylines does muddy the plot despite all intersecting in a rather cohesive way. There are plot elements that fail to tie together so cohesively, like the premise behind Big’s inclusion, but let me briefly discuss each of the stories for the uninformed. Sonic’s story is based around him and Tails learning that Eggman is plotting to collect the seven Chaos Emeralds, which, when fed to an ancient god of destruction named Chaos, will turn him into an invincible ally that will demolish Station Square, allowing the mad roboticist to build his imperial city on its ruins. So, they naturally set out to collect the Emeralds before he does.

Tails’s story is built around that same premise, but after getting separated from Sonic in the process of tailing the Egg Carrier—Eggman’s newly built flying fortress and one of the three explorable hub worlds—his backstory is revealed, albeit mostly implied, specifically of him having been neglected by others for his two tails before befriending Sonic, who taught him how to use them to fly. By collecting a Chaos Emerald to power his new plane, the Tornado 2, and stopping Eggman from blowing Station Square to smithereens with a missile after his initial plan fails, Tails realizes that it’s high time to stop relying on Sonic for everything and saves the city singlehandedly. While it seems like a run-of-the-mill arc for a kid’s cartoon, it served to enhance my attachment to Sonic for saving the social life of a kid who was left out for being different, as well as my attachment to Tails for turning what he thought was a problem into an attribute. In fact, while I was still grappling with my autism at the time, my elementary school friend Tommy Donnelly had the same thing and insisted that I treat it as a gift more than anything else, so suffice it to say, this kind of character arc really meant a lot to me. Hell, Tails’s cheesy yet heartwarming theme “Believe in Myself” became my go-to song to calm down during tamper tantrums at the time.

It’s difficult to discuss Knuckles’s story without getting into the game’s backstory, so I’ll try to seamlessly connect the two. Eggman cracks the Master Emerald open back on a floating landmass called Angel Island (no, not San Francisco’s real-world Angel Island), releasing both Chaos and the spirit of an ancient princess named Tikal. Due to Angel Island falling into the ocean as a direct result, Knuckles sets out to collect the pieces and restore the artifact he’d spent his life defending. Of course, the fact that he’s devoted to protecting the Master Emerald won’t be lost on anyone who’s played the classic games (we’ll be getting to my feelings toward those soon enough), but Knuckles is revealed in this game to have no idea why he was given this task, and this is part of what made the game as influential as it was to the rest of the franchise. His connection to the game’s backstory is never explicitly stated, but throughout each character’s story, they’re shown flashbacks of the Mystic Ruins—the third hub world next to Station Square and the Egg Carrier—thousands of years ago, when it was the capital city of a primitive echidna clan.

After the death of her grandmother and the chief of her people, Tikal’s father Pachacamac (both their names were taken from real-life Mayan city centers) took over the tribe and took on an imperialist stance, conquering other peoples through pillaging and genocide. Having discovered the Master and Chaos Emeralds at their altar, which were guarded by Chaos along with his offspring (adorable puffballs called chao, one of the biggest goddamn highlights of this whole trilogy), pacifistic Tikal had to keep her greed-crazed father from plundering the altar and obtaining the Emeralds’ mystic power for their people. When Pachacamac and his fellow tribesmen set the altar ablaze and struck down Tikal and the chao, Chaos rebelled by absorbing the Chaos Emeralds, becoming a colossal serpent called Perfect Chaos, and wiping the tribe and its neighboring peoples off the planet. Tikal sealed him inside the Master Emerald to avoid any further destruction, and after her death, her spirit was sealed inside the Emerald with him. Not only is this backstory and the player’s ability to freely explore it piece-by-piece one of the game’s most fascinating aspects, but it also provides a perfect explanation for Knuckles’s lifelong duty: to keep the world from being destroyed by an angry god, as passed down to him by his remaining ancestors before they too disappeared. In other words, it’s like The Cabin in the Woods, but with colorful talking animals.

Yeah… so, let’s try to condense the remaining characters’ stories as much as possible. Amy Rose—Sonic’s girlfriend who was totally overhauled for this game—finds a lost bird being hunted by one of Eggman’s robots. It would turn out later on that the bird has been smuggling a Chaos Emerald, but regardless, Amy sets out to reunite him with his family, initially with the hope that Sonic can offer some help along the way. It’s established early on that Amy has fallen out of contact with Sonic for a long time (presumably since the Classic Era), so after being rescued from Zero, the same robot trying to capture the bird, she decides to give up on being the damsel-in-distress she started as and continue her mission alone, even clobbering Zero to pieces the very next time they meet. This attempt to give a female character a chance at independence and personal growth was actually pretty subversive for a platformer game, giving more popular damsels-in-distress like Princess Peach a run for their money.

Regardless, the bird’s parents turn out to come from an unlikely source: E-102 Gamma, guardian of the Egg Carrier, and his previous model E-101 Beta. After Beta is deconstructed for the spare parts and the rest of the E-Series models are banished from the Egg Carrier, Gamma goes to retrieve the bird from an imprisoned Amy, only to feel a personal connection to the bird and set them both free instead. Following this incident, he acquires a conscience of his own and heads out to destroy his fellow models, understanding now that they’re simply animals contained within robotic shells. Upon hunting down and battling a newly upgraded Beta, he’s faced with his true final target—himself—before dying by Beta’s barely functional hands. Both robots explode, releasing each of the bird’s parents so they can reunite with their child.

Now, the reason I’ve saved Big’s story for last isn’t because I hate the character, as I appreciate that his dopey, bumbling nature is treated with this sweet, laid-back charm as opposed to being used for a cheap joke (Patrick from SpongeBob, a character Big is often compared to, has always been the butt of jokes about his stupidity—it’s just that those jokes always used to land perfectly.) However, the premise of Chaos possessing Big’s pet Froggy to obtain one of the Chaos Emeralds just isn’t necessary except as a means of luring (no fishing pun intended) Big into the plot, as he could simply absorb the Emerald in his puddle form and leave the scene unnoticed.

Ultimately, though, Big uses the crash-landed Tornado 2 to return to his hut from the Egg Carrier, and in Super Sonic’s story, Sonic and Tails fail to stop Chaos from obtaining the final Chaos Emerald from the plane itself. Thus, he becomes Perfect Chaos, annihilates all of Station Square in a disastrous flood (yes, it’s as insane as it sounds), destroys the second Egg Carrier model after its predecessor’s descent into the ocean, and gets defeated by Super Sonic, who’d just used the remaining energy from the fallen Emeralds to transform. Thus, Tikal reconvenes with Chaos in the heavens above, with the city and all of its inhabitants left to rot away in shambles.

See, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that this ending is kind of hilarious in hindsight, with the main cast treating this unspeakable extent of death and destruction as a hopeful win. In fact, it’s elevated even higher in my esteem, given how the mass grave of a city’s anime-style denizens is treated as the site of a victorious battle against evil while Sonic Adventure 2 ends with its less stylized humans being allowed to live another day by our heroes. It reminds me of when RedLetterMedia released a re:View episode about the obscure sci-fi schlock-fest The Ice Pirates, in which Jay said the movie would’ve had one of the greatest endings in cinematic history if it ended thirty seconds before it did—namely with everyone except the main character’s son having died from rapid aging due to a time warp, and yet also with the same child being treated as having saved the day.

Okay, tonally backwards ending aside, the fact that this game followed a never-before-seen formula (even within its own franchise), with six unique characters boasting their own individual gameplay styles, as well as such a complex yet well-told story, made it truly one of the most influential games of all time… well, it accomplished that for the original release, that is. Yeah, for more than a decade, I was the only member of my family who knew that “Sonic DX” was just a GameCube port of Sonic Adventure for the SEGA Dreamcast. Now, when it comes to discussion surrounding these two versions, the most common talking points you’ll hear are that the Dreamcast release was a masterpiece and that the DX port utterly trashed it by updating the environments, graphics, and character models.

So, the question is, why haven’t I completely given up on the DX port yet? Well, that’s because the gameplay, iconic soundtrack, and retroactively adorable charm are still very much intact, and because it’s the version I knew during the era I grew up in—the Dreamcast predated me by several years. Besides, the DX version features Mission Mode, Metal Sonic as an unlockable character, and a supersonic framerate of 60 FPS as opposed to 30. Plus, quick fades act as fairly seamless transitions between hub world areas instead of lengthy fades, loading screens, and abrupt cutoffs to the background music like on the Dreamcast.

Surely, my enjoyment playing this game—and replaying it story-by-story, stage-by-stage, subgame-by-subgame, and mission-by-mission—has both remained the same and changed drastically over the years. Oftentimes, me and my sister would take turns with the controller, exploring the hub worlds and going on pretend dates with that bizarre NPC statue outside the Station Square burger shop. Granted, it’s still far from a perfect game, and thanks to the human NPCs holding an anime art style that bothers me now more than ever, the combination of mods and beta content research has saved and preserved my adoration for the whole experience. Just take the NPCs’ art style having been altered ever so slightly to suit my needs, the original Dreamcast assets having been added back for the sake of curiosity (although I only did this on occasion due to my reverence for the DX version), and the restoration of the mysterious “Sky Chase Dragon” mini-boss that I used to read about when I was still sharing my dad’s computer as a ten-year-old. Another strange detail is that, due to my emotional connection to this game, I used to have dreams of Gamma’s story continuing after its official conclusion, at which point he’d hunt down a fresh line of previously unseen E-Series models. So, with imperfections here and there, I’ve actually managed to bring most of these dreams to life using a mod of my own called “The E-Series Survivors” (available for download here), exactly as I’d dreamt so many years ago—E-106 Eta in Emerald Coast, E-107 Theta in Speed Highway, E-108 Iota in Icecap, E-109 Kappa in Lost World, and E-110 Lambda on Angel Island at night. No, I can’t explain why Lambda was fought there of all places beyond the natural beauty of the Mystic Ruins and my lifelong reputation as a night owl.

My final notes on this game before finally moving onto the next positive entry might feel shoehorned in, but believe me when I tell you they’re worth being emphasized. The first involves one of the most divisive topics in the franchise, and we’ll be getting into more of my feelings on it later: the voice-acting. You’re bound to hear more negativity on this aspect than positivity, but when it comes to the characters and the general quality of video game voice-acting at the time, it’s phenomenal in this trilogy. Yes, there were several handoffs between games, and mostly all of the performances are ridiculously corny, but (a) that corniness fits in perfectly with the tone and demographic, and (b) they latch onto each of the characters like barnacles to a whale.

In between his early clowning career (?!) and current Broadway career, Ryan Drummond has become synonymous with his vocal performance for Sonic, as well as a primary reason for why the character was a role model of mine throughout my childhood. I’ll get into why future English voices either take away from what made him so inherently likable or work on a radically different level, but Ryan Drummond’s Sonic carries such a profoundly welcoming, affable, and encouraging attitude with every line spoken, as opposed to a focus on sarcasm or intensity. He makes the character sound so carefree and naturally friendly in a way that distracted me from the post-Sonic Heroes recasting for several years.

On the subject of other characters, Tails has his best voice actor in the series (overall, he’s actually subpar, but he fits the character perfectly and was even about as old as the character at the time), and the game acts as the first instance of Amy’s voice actress throughout the whole trilogy. Funny enough, she was the only actress until the modern games to give the character a touch of girly toughness and sarcasm alongside her trademark energetic cuteness, not to mention the lack of an uncomfortably high pitch. Big’s voice actor aside—John St. John, renowned voice actor of Duke Nukem himself—the granddaddy of the entire cast is none other than Deem Bristow, a relatively unknown actor with an impressive filmography in video games and animation under his belt, and when he gives voice to Dr. Eggman throughout this trilogy… oh, my lord. The level of regal, egomaniacal hamminess he brings to his performance without a lack of intimidation or emotional range never fails to make me smile whenever I return to this childhood favorite of mine. Even at times when the mad scientist is feeling bitter or helpless, it’s thanks to Bristow that he comes off as so brilliant, desperate, infantile, and in a few extreme cases, brick-shittingly terrifying.

Even now, I can’t help but reiterate my fondness for this game’s soundtrack and the impeccable artistry it was crafted with. I still constantly listen to the vast variety of instrumental stage themes, from jazzy numbers like act one of Casinopolis to head-banging electronic rock tunes like act two of Final Egg, but the quality of the vocal themes throughout the entire trilogy still somehow manages to astound me. Sonic himself couldn’t be summed up better than by the original version of “It Doesn’t Matter” (the chorus of which shows up sometime into the Twinkle Circuit theme in instrumental form, oddly enough), and I’ve gone from hating Amy’s sassy single “My Sweet Passion” for the feminine flair alone as a dumb kid to unironically loving it as a somewhat less dumb adult without an unceasing devotion to masculinity. I’d love to talk all day about Crush 40’s kickass yet hopeful main theme for the game, “Open Your Heart”—especially when played over the head-spinning intensity and cinematic presentation of the intro sequence—but this’ll be the first of at least two instances where I’ll be glorifying songs like one track in particular: Knuckles’s theme, “Unknown From M.E.”. Don’t ask me why it’s called that. Possibly thanks to the involvement of Dred Foxx, voice actor of iconic PS1 character PaRappa the Rapper, the song is, without a reasonable doubt, the greatest hip-hop song in the history of kids media. Hell, I would argue that it’s the only good hip-hop song in kids media, as I’ll never quite be able to cope with the popularity of the utterly embarrassing “DK Rap”, which inexplicably made it into both Smash Bros. Melee and Illumination’s Mario Bros. movie. When compared to Knuckles’s theme, it doesn’t have the top-notch vocals, it doesn’t have the earworm that is the chorus alone, and it sure as hell doesn’t have that grand sax solo during the instrumental break.

Sonic Adventure 2: Battle (Positive Example #2)

In the first of several instances of something you probably never expected to hear, I like to compare the Sonic franchise from Sonic Adventure onwards to the Star Wars saga. Like A New Hope, Sonic Adventure was the type of groundbreaking title that truly hadn’t been seen before, but like The Empire Strikes Back, Sonic Adventure 2—AKA Sonic Adventure 2: Battle, AKA “Sonic Adventure Battle 2”, AKA “The Chao Garden Game” because that’s all that many people played it for—is such a masterpiece that it practically holds the rest of the franchise together. Basically, what it was supposed to accomplish was enhance what the first Adventure game got right while cutting out all the fat (i.e., the crap it didn’t need), and what came out as a result was the very best kind of sequel. What kind of sequel is that? Well, instead of just copying the formula beat-for-beat Ghostbusters 2-style, why not create a whole new adventure with a brand-new art style, brilliant stage design with numerous real-world influences, stunningly imaginative futuristic science fiction environments, an endless stream of fun unlockable content, a radically different story structure, and a new band of complex and well-defined characters? Oh, and also a pet simulator so addicting that it’s managed to draw in random people who’ve never played a Sonic game in their lives. When it seemed like no Sonic game was going to top the ingenuity of its predecessor, this game went and topped the record by a country mile. It’s kind of like World War II after World War I, except with fewer… you know… dead Jews and Armenians. There are definitely at least two mass killings involved in the story, though. Those and at least one cow that was killed in the North American marketing campaign.

Believe it or not, it also managed to lure me in with a similar whirlwind of emotions, albeit with more fast-paced rock music. Starting up the GameCube port—the one that I and millions of other people knew, so don’t judge me—I found myself transfixed by the combination of the raining circle pattern on the otherwise dim main menu background; the slow and childlike words of wisdom by the mechanical new tutorial character, Omochao; the more intense Crush 40-esque menu music; the pleasant at-home feel of the new, improved, and revamped Chao World; and the countless multiplayer matches played against family members, each one starting at the tightly populated gamemode and character selection screen for 2P Battle mode. Unlike Shadow the Hedgehog, the fast-paced and sometimes jazz-accompanied menu music never detracted from the comfort it evoked for me, and the increased presence and involvement of my family in 2P Battle and Chao World only made it feel that much more like a home away from home. Of course, getting most of the family to play anything beyond racing and treasure hunting in 2P Battle after a certain point was a pipe dream, and it wasn’t until disturbingly recent years that they had any clue that multiplayer characters like Tikal and Chaos Zero came from the previous game as opposed to this one… even though their character select descriptions say they debuted in Sonic Adventure. Then again, who am I to judge? I was the weird kid who spent his first year or so with the game calling Chaos Zero “Chads Zero” because the “O” in “CHAOS” looked like a “D”.

Luckily, the game’s story structure is airtight compared to the last game’s. Instead of six separate character stories plus Super Sonic’s story, this game offers two film-length chapters that tell the same general story from the heroes and villains’ unique perspectives before finishing with the drastically shorter last story, which the player unlocks by completing the first two. Many people complain that the start points, end points, and specific events aren’t always provided in seamless chronological order, but given how easy it is to put the pieces together in one’s head, I don’t necessarily see this as a problem. The story begins with Eggman (Deem Bristow graciously reprises his role) breaking into an underground military facility on Prison Island, a remote landmass located south of San Francisco-inspired Central City, in search of his grandfather’s missing research project. The project turns out to be a brooding black and red hedgehog named Shadow, who promises to bring him the seven Chaos Emeralds and meet him onboard a scientific research center floating in Earth’s exosphere: the Space Colony ARK. Meanwhile, in the middle of his feud over the Master Emerald near the Great Pyramids of Giza with an arrogant jewel thief named Rouge the Bat, Knuckles keeps Eggman from stealing the artifact by shattering it into pieces, prompting him to challenge Rouge to find all the pieces before he does. After stealing one of the Chaos Emeralds from the federal reserve of Central City, thus getting his lookalike Sonic framed and arrested for the crime, Shadow meets Eggman in the ARK’s central control room and tells him that the weapon of mass destruction built there, the Eclipse Cannon, can be used to hold the planet ransom and build his robot empire, should all seven Emeralds be used to reactivate it—a task that Rouge comes aboard the ARK to offer assistance with. With help from Tails and Amy, Sonic escapes from his cell on Prison Island, where Eggman, Shadow, and Rouge have returned to steal most of the remaining Emeralds and set off explosives all across the island to cover their tracks. When the Eclipse Cannon’s destructive power is demonstrated by blowing half of Earth’s moon into white stone fragments—followed by an ominous twenty-four-hour countdown until the next launch, this time on Earth—Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Amy track Eggman’s location from Central City to his base inside one of the Egyptian Pyramids, where they take one of his spacecraft up to the ARK with the intent of disarming its cannon and saving the world from the maniac’s violent conquest.

Yes, that does sound like a mouthful, which is why it’s split into two separate stories, silly. While the story is good overall—especially in the not-so-story-oriented platformer genre—the last story is where it goes from ominous and intense to unexpectedly tragic and moving (but no less corny and melodramatic, which is the way it should probably be anyhow). Even with Eggman having all seven Emeralds in his possession and the Eclipse Cannon having been disarmed by our heroes, a far greater threat is unveiled, that being the relative whose personal diary led Eggman to his discovery of Shadow: Gerald Robotnik. The birth of the black hedgehog as a research project experimenting with biological immortality to eventually save the life of Maria, the professor’s terminally ill granddaughter and a dear friend of Shadow’s (a side of the story not mentioned verbatim in the game but detailed in the Japanese game guide)—as well as the construction of the Eclipse Cannon—was deemed unlawful by the United Federation of Earth, who sent a strike team up to the ARK to shut down the professor’s research… only for other test subjects like the “Artificial Chaos” to break out and attack, prompting the military to commit an all-out massacre against Gerald’s colleagues as well as Maria, hence Shadow’s desire to annihilate the human race. Before his capture and execution—the final step in the government’s attempt to cover up their actions and claim the massacre as an unavoidable accident—Gerald lost his mind out of grief, having blamed his own research on the deaths of his associates, and activated a revenge-fueled program that would initiate should anyone use the Chaos Emeralds to reactivate the Eclipse Cannon.

Now, with Eggman having fulfilled that very requirement, Gerald sends his chilling final message to the people of Earth as the entire colony hurtles straight toward the blue planet. Since the power of the Emeralds has the potential to blow the planet to pieces upon impact, the heroes and villains alike race toward the core of the Eclipse Cannon to shut down the program using the help of the Master Emerald that Knuckles had recently restored… except for Shadow, that is, who simply watches the program commence, deeming his mission a success. Through Amy’s desperate pleas, however, Shadow recovers his long-lost memory of Maria’s dying wish: to defend the species she loved so dearly. Thus, he teams up with Sonic to defeat the Biolizard—an early prototype of the project that birthed him, a gargantuan reptile wholly devoted to keeping Gerald’s program active—and together in their super forms, they zap the ARK back into orbit… using all of the Chaos energy Shadow has left in him. The story ends with the planet saved, Shadow falling to his death on the planet below, and the rest of the cast coming together in the ARK’s observatory to mourn the black hedgehog as the credits roll.

Now, there’s no doubt that plot holes and other inconsistencies can be cherry-picked from this game’s story, and like I said earlier, the writing of all three games in this trilogy is certainly not the best (we’ll be getting to the real bad examples a little later, though.) Of course, that doesn’t mean I agree with all of the critiques out there, notably the one that claims the game takes itself way too seriously. For me, though? The fact that such a quaint, child-oriented series with such zany, colorful characters tries to tell stories involving greed, insanity, redemption, and other such elements with a straight face in spite of the melodramatic execution is what gives it a lot of its charm. It reminds me of RedLetterMedia’s re:View episode about the 1990 Ninja Turtles movie, particularly when they bring attention to how grim and atmospheric much of the film feels, even throughout all the high-octane action scenes involving… well… man-sized anthropomorphic reptiles built by Jim Henson. You appreciate the visual absurdity because it doesn’t come off as dishonest or tongue-in-cheek about the material, yet it still has the same corny execution to keep it family-friendly. Also, general story oddities can be easily explained away—just take the bomb timer on Prison Island, as Sonic’s given eight minutes to escape the island in the hero story while the timer’s shown ticking at one minute in the dark story. Thinking about it in hindsight, though, the explanation seems fairly simple to me: the timer’s at one minute in both stories (we never see it during the hero story), so in the context of the story, Sonic only has that amount of time to make it through Green Forest—the player is given eight minutes because it’s a far more reasonable time limit. As for how and why Sonic has the same ability to utilize Chaos Control as Shadow… I unfortunately don’t have an immediate answer. Maybe, the real Chaos Control was the friends we made along the way.

In hindsight, I will admit that there are a number of other confusing details in the writing, such as why Rouge collects three Chaos Emeralds in Security Hall when they end up having collected four. To be fair, one could justify this based on how every Knuckles and Rouge stage involves three objectives (Master Emerald shards or gate keys), so they could’ve decided to just give her three Emeralds to collect in this stage while, in the context of the story, she actually collects four… if she didn’t show up in the next two cutscenes with only the three on hand, which seems to disprove this. Probably the most crucial example is Eggman’s plot to hold the planet ransom with the Eclipse Cannon, a weapon with the capacity to destroy a planet, as he only hopes to conquer the world as opposed to destroying it. The best way to justify this is that the cannon only destroys half the Moon during the demonstration, so that’s most likely the same amount of damage Eggman plans to cause the second time around if the Federation doesn’t surrender. This essentially means that the mention of the cannon’s capacity to destroy a planet is unnecessary at best and, at worst, very misleading. On the other hand, possibly the smallest yet hardest detail to make sense of is when Shadow catches Rouge in the act of taking the Emeralds for herself, during which he identifies her as the government spy Rouge the Bat… even though he already knows her name. This can probably be boiled down to a translation error, which happens a few times throughout the story, but it does come out sounding rather obvious and garbled.

I am by no means a player who only flocked to this game for Chao World—I find all six characters and all three gameplay styles equally fun and formulaic in their respective stages, and with five missions in each of the thirty-one stages, you’ll have a whole lot more to do after the story than Kart Race and Boss Attack. That isn’t to say raising chao didn’t make up the bulk of this game’s highlights for me and my sisters, though, as I alone have probably spent more than fifty percent more time in this game’s overhauled Chao World than I did in SADX‘s chao gardens. We’d take turns collecting animals and chaos drives in the stages to feed to our chao and boost their stats, quickly unlocking the hero and dark gardens along the way. If stages like Sky Rail or Cosmic Wall detracted at all from the welcoming vibes of this Sonic trilogy—in which case, they really didn’t whatsoever—then it was thanks to the grassy hills and clear blue water of the neutral garden; the angelic paradise in the clouds that was the hero garden, white marble fountain and all; and the decrepit silver rock plateau of the dark garden with its red water lake that maintained a familiarly homey feel. While we did come damn near close to breeding immortal Chaos chao (but nowhere close to acquiring the rare and adorable Tails, Knuckles, and Amy chao), the one chao to truly stand out in our memories for… some reason was Kimmy, a white hero chao with a bat’s legless lower half and jagged tail, along with a peacock’s green forehead tuft. Since the moment she became engulfed in her death cocoon, we’ve never quite finished mourning her loss as the real saddest death in the game… until I was able to use a chao editor to resurrect her in the PC version many years later. Thank you, mods, for making me understand how much of a fool I was for being so distraught over this.

Now, sure, Sonic Adventure and SADX definitely have their fair share of extra content—just take the character upgrades, the hidden hub world chao eggs, Twinkle Circuit, Hedgehog Hammer, the Dreamcast-exclusive DLC events, and the DX-exclusive Mega Drive Collection—but chances are, the time you’ll spend with it will pale in comparison to the additional playtime this game offers. Instead of the unrepeatable A, B, and C missions for each stage in its predecessor, all thirty-one stages have five separate missions that can be replayed for fun or to beat your previous scores! As hard as they can prove at times, the “find the lost chao” missions are admittedly my favorite of these extra missions for the amount of exploration they encouraged (I actually never completed most of these missions growing up, so it was only in recent years that I discovered hidden parts of several levels for the first time!) Plus, as an advantage of the GameCube version over the original Dreamcast release, the playable character menu themes are available from the start, yet four extra menu themes can be unlocked in different ways—the Amy, Omochao, and Maria menu themes can be bought with rings after a certain number of emblems is earned, and entering a cheat code will unlock a theme centered around and narrated by… the president’s secretary? Yeah, the fact that you can be guided around the menus by a personal secretary (who may or may not secretly be Maria, who was never actually killed in my ultimate pointless fan-theory) is both unexpected and kind of brilliant, now that I think about it. Oh, and you can also replay the story chapter-by-chapter after completing it because this game is objectively better than the previous.

I honestly may have understated my appreciation for the dazzling creativity of SADX‘s soundtrack and stages, but like in most other areas, this game somehow reaches a new high. Not only do the real-world locations that inspired many of the stages add to the inventiveness of their design as opposed to diminishing it, but their theme music manages to fit them to the letter while evoking that same semi-surreal feeling. In a general sense, I can’t offer any praise for City Escape’s theme that hasn’t already been offered, but it’s not like the stage itself and its distinct Northern California flair doesn’t craft an unforgettable gameplay sequence using the downward slopes of San Francisco’s upper residential neighborhoods. Along with that comes Radical Highway, a stage that may not have one of my all-time favorite themes, but the decision to incorporate the towering pipes along the sides of the Golden Gate Bridge for use with the newly introduced rail-grinding mechanic was nothing short of ingenious.

With all due admiration towards Prison Island stages like Security Hall and Metal Harbor—a Rouge and Sonic stage, respectively, that may or may not take inspiration from Alcatraz—space stages like Eternal Engine, Crazy Gadget, Meteor Herd, Final Chase, and Cannon’s Core (I honestly can’t bring myself to put down Mad Space, although I can’t disagree that it’s a vast and disorienting stage to pass) deserve praise for bearing some of the most alien and breathtaking sci-fi settings to not be envisioned or directed by Denis Villeneuve or James Cameron. The blast doors with their eerie roaring sounds, glass-floored corridors with green Matrix digital rain walls, light-speckled hanging towers beneath the ARK, scrolling lights along the rectangular runways, and loop-dee-loops of illuminating rails that form tangled transport routes take such a tiny environment compared to the “blue marble” down below and make it feel fifty times larger, as well as just that much more intriguing to explore.

While the ghost-plagued pyramid interiors just serve as more prime examples of jaw-dropping creativity with real-life influences (Egg Quarters is great for its exclusive stealth mechanic, and it’s hard to put into words how terrified and unprepared I was to come face-to-face with King Boom Boo after the first time I passed Death Chamber), there’s one stage and one part of the overall soundtrack that are worthy of brief discussion yet again: Pumpkin Hill and Knuckles’s rap music. Pumpkin Hill is one of many Sonic stages to act as the perfect Halloween backdrop—Hang Castle and Mystic Mansion are just ahead of it—and while its theme is no doubt catchy, related stage themes like those for Aquatic Mine, Death Chamber, and Meteor Herd are even more impressive examples of rap music in kids media done right. Aquatic Mine blends together funk, light jazz, and chillwave tracks to create a rather relaxing number; Death Chamber makes for an unexpectedly soothing jazz tune in spite of such a distressing name, especially thanks to the hidden exchange between Sonic and Knuckles that actually had to be censored in the GameCube version for using a swear word; and Meteor Herd seamlessly blends together a set of spacey electronic tracks with top-notch backup vocals to suit the hazardous asteroid mining colony that the stage takes place throughout. It almost makes you forget that the guy who performed the rapping himself falsely claimed that he was never paid for his work after being charged with felony weapon possession. Almost.

You know, on the subject of vocal themes, Sonic Adventure 2 is the definition of memorable in that area, as well… but maybe still not as much as it deserves to be. “Live & Learn” has gone on to become about as beloved as “Escape From the City”, and Eggman’s theme titled… well… “E.G.G.M.A.N.” (yes, that is how his name’s spelled) blows the roof off as much as it makes the opportunity to wreak havoc as him that much more appealing. I get the feeling that I’m probably not alone with my preference of this game’s “It Doesn’t Matter” cover over the Sonic Adventure version and Tails and Knuckles’s themes from Sonic Adventure over their covers in this game, but this is where my viewpoints start to become comparatively unpopular. What the hell else is new? First off, I’m not a huge fan of “Throw it All Away” until it gets somber and vengeful during the chorus, as I normally like more harmonic songs with a rigid and consistent tune, and “Throw it All Away” feels somewhat random and sloppy in that department (again, until the chorus, especially when it’s repeated at the end). Second of all, I’ve developed a strong adoration for “Fly in the Freedom” in recent years, as it used to be another case of my dumb little kid self hating “girly stuff” like Amy’s theme. It’s a lovely and supremely underrated jazz club number that still manages to surprise me with how rarely people talk about it nowadays. As for the Biolizard boss theme, “Supporting Me”, I’d call it underrated if there hadn’t been, like, five official covers made of it since this game, but it has this tragic and chaotic darkness to both its lyrics and its overall sound, seemingly having been written from the perspective of Shadow or Gerald after the ARK incident.

“To the pressure, everything’s just like an illusion; I’ll be losing you, before long…”

– That part of my brain making me crap myself.

If you recall, I made it clear that the voice actors for these games make all the difference in my overall enjoyment, and more than any other, this game’s the gold standard when it comes to the characters and their voice actors… well, for the most part, at least. An opinion that you’ll be hearing a few times across this blog is that I much prefer taking more time to flesh out a cast of fewer characters than doing less to develop a larger cast. As much as I admire Heroes and its impressive number of playable characters, this game actually benefits from featuring a smaller cast, as its individual members are defined far better as a result.

While Sonic remains so naturally affable thanks to Ryan Drummond reprising his role, he’s given a crucial weakness: a comparative lack of intelligence, which is how Eggman is able to ambush, trap, and come within moments of killing his “admirable adversary”. Not only does this play a key role in making Eggman look like a true genius over the course of the story, but it also embodies why Sonic so desperately needs a wise techie like Tails by his side, who’s still demonstrating his independence after the last game while never holding back from sounding adorably chipper, thanks to his returning actor. Interestingly, Knuckles’s new actor in this game is one of the best actors in general throughout the franchise due to the slickness and believability in his performance, although Amy’s innocence is emphasized a little too much over her stronger side within the writing (the fact that she gets held hostage by Eggman kind of dampens her character arc from the last game, but I’m willing to look past it as she rescues Sonic earlier in the same game, convinces Shadow to save the world in the last story, and never gets captured once in Heroes.)

It’s here, however, that we get introduced to the best voice actors for two of the best characters: David Humphrey as Shadow and Lani Minella as Rouge. With Shadow being as dubious and reflective as he is, the magic of David Humphrey’s performance is the emotional range he brings to the table, as he doesn’t sound nearly as sinister as, say, Jason Griffith—when he takes a heroic turn at the end, his tone is versatile enough to suddenly sound positive and determined without much of a shift in the overall delivery. As for the latter newcomer, Rouge is not an especially popular character due to her… ahem… hourglass curves and jiggle physics, but the surprising thing is that she really isn’t sexualized at all in terms of her personality or how other characters perceive her. Instead, she’s emphasized as being proud and cunning, and characters like Knuckles and Eggman see right through her worldly swagger—following Shadow’s sacrifice, we get to see her show a stronger adoration for something other than riches, and most importantly, she never gets ogled at once (until Sonic X, of course, where the non-diegetic saxophone keeps ogling her every goddamn time she appears onscreen).

Sonic Heroes (Positive Example #3)

“Here we are…”

– Amy Rose with perfect vocal uncertainty.

Remember the Star Wars comparison I made all the way at the start of the last section? Well, in line with that comparison, if Sonic Adventure is like A New Hope and Sonic Adventure 2 is like The Empire Strikes Back, then Sonic Heroes is mighty comparable to Return of the Jedi. How so, you may ask? Well, what I mean is that it’s very good—phenomenal in some areas—but the problems to come have begun to seep their way in. I’ll be very vocal about those problems as we go, but although it’s ranked as my third favorite of the only three Sonic games I still enjoy, its positive aspects deserve to be emphasized. You know what? We’ll play it by ear and find a healthy balance along the way.

In simple terms, Sonic Heroes is the last great Sonic game in my opinion, as it features the final remaining traces of what’s always drawn me to the series. For instance, this is technically the last time the voice actors I’d grown to love lent their unmatched vocal performances to the franchise (although some, like Ryan Drummond and David Humphrey, had a few of their previous lines reused in Sega SuperStars as their last official credits), both due to the expiration of their contracts and the unfortunate death of Deem Bristow in 2005. We’ll get into the voice-acting a little later, but for the record, it’s pretty clear that this game was meant to be a lighter and simpler change in direction since the unusually grim and momentous adventure that came before it, making it more colorful and upbeat than even Sonic Adventure.

The pure tone and simplified story structure, as well as the all-new three-member team gameplay, embody what makes the Adventure games so memorable: each game feels totally fresh and new compared to the last. Sonic Adventure 2 carried over some of the gameplay styles from the first game, but the physics, soundtrack, character abilities, extra content, and the rest of the general execution made it stand out as its own separate experience. Now, while there are clear parallels between the two Adventure games, Heroes is notable for being utterly unrecognizable, with loose and bouncy physics, three character classes that can be rotated between on the fly, and a lively visual style that really pops thanks to the distinct glossy finish applied to the character models. The visual style was basically repeated for Sonic Riders a few years later, except this game actually gives the characters their proper bodily proportions. I have said visual style; the enormous, fantastical, oftentimes idealistic landscapes; and the jovial, borderline celebratory soundtrack to thank for the smörgåsbord of happy vibes that still keep me smiling as I continue to replay it.

The story will be the easiest to explain, and by a wide margin. See, the game doesn’t feel unfocused, necessarily (see my Spirited Away post here for a highly unpopular stance on the extreme in that area), as it instead establishes the characters’ motivations early on so they can all traverse one truly vast and inventive setting after another. Ultimately, though, they’re all after their goals the whole way through, and upon reaching them, they all end up at the same place together to defeat the ultimate threat. Last story aside, there are four stories to coincide with the four playable teams: Team Sonic, Team Dark, Team Rose, and Team Chaotix. Team Sonic’s is probably the most basic, with Sonic receiving a threat about Eggman’s newest plot to conquer the world, and that plot turns out to be the construction and deployment of his imperial aerial battleship fleet (imagine the Egg Carrier times a hundred.)

Team Dark’s is by far the most complex, starting with Rouge sneaking into Eggman’s lab to rob him, only to find a formerly deceased Shadow preserved in a stasis tank. When a hulking E-Series model named E-123 Omega turns back on, he and Shadow get into a physical altercation, as Omega has sought to destroy his creator and all of his fellow creations. Rouge breaks up the altercation, learns that Shadow is suffering from amnesia, and joins them in seeking out Eggman—Rouge for his riches, Shadow to restore his lost memories, and Omega as revenge for getting locked away and disposed of. Along the way, evidence points to the Shadow we see being a bionic clone of the original, particularly the giant cloning lab populated with long rows of Shadows in their own respective stasis tanks at the very end. According to the Cutting Room Floor page here, Shadow wasn’t meant to return until fan outcry demanded it, but what I find impressive is that his death wasn’t entirely retconned, either—instead of just bringing him back, Sonic Team understood that the mystery behind him was part of what made him interesting, so by making it so he could very well still be dead, they kept that sense of intrigue alive.

Team Rose’s story may not be defined as such until it starts, but it’s quite clearly the beginner-level team story, considering it starts with the Sea Gate tutorial stage and features the shortest and easiest stage layouts. Basically, Amy is spending the day with her friends Cream and Big when it’s revealed that Chocola, the brother of Cream’s chao Cheese (get it?), and Big’s pet Froggy have gone missing, so together, they set out to find them as well as who’s responsible. We’ll get into Cream and a couple of other character-related gripes in the next paragraph, but Team Chaotix—a detective agency introduced all the way back in Knuckles’ Chaotix, minus classic member Mighty the Armadillo—is considered by many to be the most relatable and conceptually humorous team in the game, as they’re only after a paycheck and get inadvertently sucked into the main conflict. Presumably after a long stretch of boring inactivity, they get in contact with a sketchy new client who’s willing to pay top dollar for their services. Claiming to “never turn down work that pays” (hopefully not all work that pays), they’re guided by the client via a chain of specific missions exclusive to their story, making them also the most replayable team in my opinion. After following a number of blatantly obvious clues that they somehow overlook, they find out that the client has been Eggman all along, who was locked in a cell on his air fleet’s whale shark flagship (extra points for featuring marine life-based battleships, in my opinion.)

As revealed in the last story, his jailer turns out to be Metal Sonic, who’s taken to overthrowing his master, upgrading himself to a more advanced form dubbed Neo Metal Sonic (amazingly also voiced by Ryan Drummond, albeit with layers of filters applied) with the capability of transforming between two dragon-like monstrosities, and turning the world into a kingdom of robots. Using the Chaos Emeralds that each of the teams have collected over time through special stages (all of which must be passed in order to unlock the last story), Sonic goes super and takes to the skies with Tails and Knuckles to stop his “loathsome copy” from getting away with a conquest of his own. While Metal Sonic inevitably fails, a cheat code can be entered in multiplayer to turn each of the four teams into sinister metallic versions of themselves, seemingly implied to have been assimilated by Metal Sonic as the ultimate “what if?” scenario. You can download a mod I made that loads these “fake characters” in singleplayer here.

As you can probably tell by now, the story is pretty straightforward and boiler-plate, especially when it comes to the villains’ motivations, which is why there’s the brilliance of the stage design to mostly make up for that. However, this isn’t always the case, as the characters are portrayed about as relatively lackluster as the cast of Return of the Jedi and then some. While Shadow and Rouge retain exactly what worked about them in Sonic Adventure 2, voice actors included—with Shadow definitely coming off as more relaxed and upbeat, that is—the same applies to Sonic minus the strange choice to have him basically laugh off Shadow’s unexpected resurrection, considering how affected he was by his demise at the end of the last game. I have to say, though, that I am grateful for the return of Knuckles’s actor from the last game, because Tails’s new actor in this game is… well, I guess I don’t know the polite word for it. Let’s just say, I found out later that he shares the same last name as Espio and Charmy’s, so it all makes sense to me now. There really is no success in showbiz like being related to the stars, is there? I won’t give him too much grief over it, though, as his nasally delivery is admittedly sort of cute, and the last thing I’d want is to pull a Jake Lloyd out of nowhere (speaking of Star Wars references). Quality-wise, Amy’s vocal performance is a close second to the one from Sonic Adventure for leaning way towards the sassy side of her personality (as well as for the character’s greater independence compared to the classic games) while John St. John’s second Big performance is just a tad dopier than the first, but Cream? Well… let’s just say, it’s not a voice-acting problem. See, Cream is proof that childlike cuteness is enough to outweigh a less-than-complex personality given her general popularity, so I just don’t feel any connection to her unless she’s given something more to work with, like an overly headstrong desire to grow up. As for the other newcomers, Omega is basically just a less complex Gamma on steroids despite also being voiced by John St. John (yes, I initially found that just as hard to believe), and Charmy is so objectively whiny and annoying that even a hidden setting in the PC version isn’t afraid to tell it like it is.

As far as characters go, Espio is at least relatively well-defined, but (a) not to the extent of Shadow or Rouge, and (b) technically, so is Cream, but I sure as hell don’t like how she’s defined. Ultimately, my favorite member of Team Chaotix—and possibly my favorite newcomer, if that tells you anything about them—is Vector. This is partially because of his gruff, hard-nosed detective attitude and his recurring annoyance toward Charmy, but a major contributing factor is his unique voice, which was lent to him by a somewhat prolific voice actor named Marc Biagi. Thick Brooklyn accent aside, it’s a suitably corny performance for a Sonic character, but I probably wouldn’t make such a strong note to discuss it if that was how he always sounded. The bizarre thing is that Heroes is the only game where he’s played by this guy, and his two other voice actors—one from Sonic X and one from virtually everything else—are absolutely egregious. I mean, sure, they’re both irritating and high-pitched in general, but especially for the type of character they’re playing, as not even the noticeable accent in his Sonic X voice can make up for how inappropriate it sounds. As a result, Heroes carries a bit of this “collector’s item” quality as the last gasp of Vector’s first and only great voice actor, as well as the rest of the superior voice cast.

The stages and their respective themes deserve plenty of love and attention, but the vocal themes that this game has to offer deserve some of their own due to how much of it they’re deprived of. Instead of a profound title like “Open Your Heart” or “Live & Learn”, the main theme of Sonic Heroes is named… well… “Sonic Heroes”, making it sound relatively uncreative, and people who sing impressions of it like to make the “HEROES!” lyric sound overly loud and broken. As funny as those impressions can be, the song is actually on par with the previous games’ main themes in a quality sense, and the “HEROES!” part flows like a lazy river because of the multiple layers of simultaneous vocal tracks. “We Can” is cute but still a tad too corny for even my liking; “This Machine” is a kickass electronic joyride with phenomenal vocals; “Follow Me” combines Tails and Amy’s themes from Sonic Adventure into a high-spirited love ballad; and “Team Chaotix” (again, very inventive with the song titles) is notable for not just its distinct “tough guy” vibes, but also for having been performed by Gunnar Nelson of the classic rock band Nelson. If it feels like an indicator of a tanked career to do a song for Sonic Heroes, his brother Matthew “starred” in the atrocious Best of the Worst movie, The Item. He’s the one who really went down the gutter.

I figure we might as well save any further negativity for the next several game discussions in this post. The Adventure games have so many well-constructed stages that it’s impossible to underscore them, but Heroes went above and beyond with its level of creativity by implementing some of the most wide-open and eye-catching stages ever featured in a linear game. These stages come with some of the greatest background music tracks in the series, too, which starts out on display with the breezy tropical themes for stages like Seaside Hill and Ocean Palace (way to strike a pleasant chord with me right out of the gate, am I right?) In fact, these stages in particular do a pretty phenomenal job of blending together the patterned hill stages from the classic games with the recurring presence of ancient ruins throughout the Adventure games. Of course, I feel like it’s slotted right between the Adventure games’ city stages and Baltimore as one of my earliest-ever family trips, but Grand Metropolis certainly played a key role in cementing my fascination with cityscapes that’s stronger now more than ever. That’s not to say I ever expect to see blue gel conveyor belt roads lined with transparent pipes flowing with red-hot thermal energy in any cities during my lifetime, but this game’s stages do tend to strongly benefit from crossing over into the fantastical.

I could go on and on with the odd yet brilliant decisions to build an entire city out of bingo and pinball tables, a rocky canyon guarded by revolver-like gun turrets, and a dense jungle populated by rain-triggering frogs, but… well, we’d never be able to move on with this post, so I’m just going to admit up front that Hang Castle and Mystic Mansion are two of the best Sonic stages of all time, arguably surpassing Pumpkin Hill. Spooky haunted castles with pumpkin-headed ghosts aside, they earn this status by featuring full interior and exterior sections on the floor and ceiling, allowing the player to push ominous spherical switches to change the direction of gravity. Hang Castle gets extra points for having individual upside down and right-side up background tracks, but there is no occasion where listening to the Mystic Mansion theme doesn’t drill the desperate need to get up and dance into my brain. It truly is to instrumental themes what “Escape From the City” is to vocal themes.

Now, as far as extra content in this game goes… let’s move onto the negative examples, shall we?

The Meh-Factor

I’m going to be an outlier among other cynical and disinterested Sonic fans, as the modern games aren’t where I believe the series has been at its worst, although it’s definitely where my interest has waned the most over the years (Frontiers was admittedly the nail in the coffin, as it was the first Sonic game in a while that I didn’t even want to bother playing.) For the record, the trilogy discussed thus far was not only my introduction to Sonic, meaning the classic games just were never in my wheelhouse, but it contains all of the main entries within one of the “eras” in Sonic‘s history.

Now, I like to order the eras of this franchise in a slightly different manner from other people, and my methods of doing so relate just as much to their games’ tone, writing, and voice-acting as pre-existing ordering criteria. It starts with the Classic Era, which lasted from 1991-1998 and spanned systems from the Genesis to the Saturn. The era I knew growing up, the Dreamcast Era, lasted from 1998-2005 and relied on systems like the Dreamcast, GameCube, Xbox, and PlayStation 2. The era that… well, embodies everything I hate will be dubbed the Grungy Anime Era (known by others as the 4Kids or Dark Era), and it ran from 2005-2009 on the GameCube, Xbox, and PlayStation 2 initially, then on the Wii, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3. Finally, the Modern Era has been running from 2008 to the present day (yes, it intersects with the Grungy Anime Era for reasons I will be providing) on new-gen systems all the way to the Switch, Xbox Series X, and PlayStation 5. Part of this ordering also has to do with Sonic’s age and voice actors, as it’s impossible for me to hear each of his actors over the years and accept the notion that he’s always been fifteen. No, in my mind, he was anywhere from seven to ten when he was voiced by Jaleel White in the ’90s cartoon series; Ryan Drummond’s Sonic from eleven to fourteen; Jason Griffith’s from fifteen to eighteen; and Roger Craig Smith’s from nineteen to twenty-two (Deven Christian Mack’s would be twenty-three to twenty-six, but Sonic Prime is where I stop keeping track.) After all, Jaleel White (yes, Steve Urkel himself!) certainly gave him his youngest-sounding voice; Ryan Drummond made him sound a little older but still no less wholesome; Jason Griffith represented his snarkier teenage edgelord years; and Roger Craig Smith gave him a boost of testosterone and a more mature sense of humor.

Look, just because I don’t treat another era fondly doesn’t mean I flat-out hate it. It just means that it lacks the same magic as my own personal “golden era”. Hell, there are games in the Dreamcast Era like Sonic Shuffle and Sonic Battle that I haven’t even played and never intend to. So, yes, the Classic Era is highly creative, and the original game played a key role in pushing the platformer genre forward with never-before-seen gameplay mechanics. Of course, that hasn’t stopped me from stumbling time after time in these games because the Dreamcast Era games I know have such smooth and free-flowing physics. The 2D classic games are oddly sluggish by comparison, which is fine if that’s what you’re used to (hence why so many people view Heroes‘s physics as being way too slippery for their liking), but it makes Sonic significantly slower and requires a far greater level of momentum than I’m used to, a factor that even applies to 3D classic games I played on the Gems Collection like Sonic R and Sonic the Fighters. As a matter of fact, that’s discounting the fact that much of the Dreamcast Era’s characterization had yet to make its way in, resulting in fans championing the return of characters like Mighty and Ray when they barely even counted (or count to this day) as actual characters.

In the case of the Modern Era, lumping Sonic Unleashed into it doesn’t fully follow my criteria for featuring the Grungy Anime Era voice cast, but it fits in perfectly when it comes to the gameplay and tone. I’ve actually never played Sonic Colors due to my level of disinterest alone—neither have I ever even finished Sonic Generations for the same reason—but I actually admired the avatar creator and dystopian feel of Sonic Forces in spite of that game’s mostly mediocre soundtrack and general execution (although, like the rest of the series, it’s not totally lacking in solid music tracks, either). In fact, Team Sonic Racing felt like a breath of fresh air despite its many weaknesses, both as a fairer and more fluid Mario Kart alternative and for converging from the tiresome copy-paste boost formula of the modern games. Let’s just say, if my Definitive Childhood Trilogy is like the original Star Wars trilogy, the Modern Era is like the sequel trilogy: it’s not the lowest point in terms of quality, but it is the lowest point in terms of creativity and my overall interest level.

Then, there’s the prequel trilogy equivalent.

Shadow the Hedgehog (Negative Example #1)

Don’t worry—anything with a high potential for controversy will be saved until after the first two examples. For now, let’s just stick with the first negative entry with an absurd amount of potential, as well as the first and only that I was actually pretty fond of growing up. Just for a little extra context, the reason I decided to rename the 4Kids Era was due to the actors, tone, and at times, the gameplay of the following entries, as the Adventure games at least knew how far to push the envelope of how dark a Sonic game should get. Yes, the fate of Station Square and Gerald Robotnik’s fall from grace were pretty dour, but the main cast always maintained a chipper and optimistic attitude, even in the darkest of times. It still felt like a kids game because, ultimately, Sonic is inherently a kids cartoon character. He was initially designed in 1990 so that a child could easily draw him (which worked like magic, considering how many goddamn times my sisters and I used to draw everything Sonic-related way back when), and especially in Genesis-era promo artwork, it’s clear that his design took many liberties from silent cartoon star Felix the Cat and new public domain entrant Mickey Mouse. The fact that such dark fantasy and science fiction elements could be worked in alone is pretty surprising, and it’s even more amazing that they managed to keep it relatively kid-friendly the whole way through.

The Grungy Anime Era, however? Well, the problem is that Sonic Team wanted to turn Sonic into Goku, Naruto, or the lead characters from your Bleaches and your Demon Slayers and your Attack on Titans and your blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah when the character they were working with was… well… a hip, talking blue rodent from the ’90s.

Suffice it to say, a spinoff like Shadow the Hedgehog could’ve been given more wiggle room when it comes to going full grimdark, but (a) it still needed to be written well, and (b) the innocent pre-established parts of the world needed to carry the same wholesome spirit that’s always defined them. Unfortunately, and for all of the highly creative ideas loaded with the potential to craft a bleaker yet meaningful character study, Shadow the Hedgehog was the first game to embody the numerous problems that plagued the Grungy Anime Era moving forward (although I will admit that the common remark of his search for answers in this game being pointless is partially justified, even if I disagree due to the numerous details of his past that we still weren’t privy to before). Now, I’ve gone over many of the game’s problems and even summed up its plot in my Black Doom post here, so most of the gripes provided here will be based around specific ticks in the writing… though, then again, some of the problems are sadly unavoidable, namely the voice cast.

I won’t go on about this for very long, as it’s honestly the least of the game’s problems, but in the Black Doom post, I made a note to complain about Saints Row IV and its horrendous alien antagonist as a comparison to the conceptual brilliance of the Black Arms’ ghostly ruler. Well, in retrospect, Shadow the Hedgehog really isn’t all that dissimilar to Saints Row IV in that it shares the exact same engine as the previous game (Heroes in Shadow‘s case) with just a lackluster bloom effect added, not to mention the god-awful storytelling and cast of characters. This in and of itself is disappointing given Shadow‘s absolutely gorgeous CGI cutscene animation that still never fails to take my breath away, so talk about a missed opportunity to at least capture some of that art design in-game—you know, instead of just reusing the same vibrant visual flair from Heroes that simply doesn’t suit the darker vibes this game had intended. I would, in no way, be surprised to find out that Shadow the Hedgehog was a DLC expansion for Heroes that Sonic Team decided abruptly to convert into a “full sequel”.

As far as the writing goes, I’ve taken countless notes in the process of writing my Choose Your Own Adventure-style rewrite of the game’s story, dubbed the “Recollected Cut”. One aspect that I knew from the start required an immediate remedy was the likability of our main protagonist, as I’ve been on the record about how horribly unlikable Shadow is for a while now. The fact that he takes such a drastic shift between this game and Heroes without any clear transition makes it all the more bizarre, considering how charming and determined he was in the latter title.

Possibly a worse crime than that, however, is the overuse of swear words. I think characters like Black Doom and the G.U.N. Commander can use the occasional “hell” or “damn” if it doesn’t feel cringey or excessive, but (a) Shadow himself should never swear—let alone every goddamn time he takes damage, which happens a lot—and (b) characters like Sonic and Espio sure as hell shouldn’t be using them. It might not be super common in Sonic’s case, but he does curse if the player fails the hero mission for Lethal Highway and again during the last story, albeit without subtitles due to the layered dialogue, and that needs to be dropped like a bad cold. Hell, just as an example of how the characters can benefit from less vulgar dialogue, part of the scene before the dark stage Air Fleet shows the Commander glancing over the photo of Sonic and Shadow in the Oval Office, to which he says, “The black creatures will feel their own bloody hell!”, thus making every player physically squirm in their seats. Now, compare that to the Recollected Cut, where he simply mutters to himself, “When he’s not looking, Mr. Savior… when he’s not looking.” Then again, who am I to talk? I’m the one who basically inserted a little-known Star Trek: The Next Generation line from forty years ago into a similar scene.

“Just yesterday, I was the leader of the universe as I know it. Today? I’m just another voice in a chorus.”

– What a modicum of extra thought and maturity can get you.

There are honestly too many examples of poor writing to get into right out of the gate, like how zero attempts were made to bridge the last story with any of the ten endings (the Recollected Cut even takes that into account by featuring a final dark, neutral, and hero story that each continue from their respective endings) and how the president and his escape craft remain untouched in the cutscene before GUN Fortress—regardless of whether the player chose to demolish them in Air Fleet or bombard the White House with the Eclipse Cannon after the Blue Falcon boss fight—but since most of this was already discussed in an older post, it’s time to get into one of the first major issues introduced in this game: the voice-acting. I’m hitting a home run today with my lack of repetition, aren’t I?

Since I’ve talked primarily about positive examples during the Dreamcast Era, we should get into when that all fell apart, and in the blink of an eye, too. Since the recasting was due to expired contracts and Deem Bristow’s passing, I’d never be one of the wanton superfans to send angry letters over it (then again, considering who I was at the time, I suppose I would), but the choice to sign on the Sonic X cast was… well, why don’t we get into each individual actor and why they just don’t work? Let’s start with the positives: Mike Pollock as Eggman. Now, for the negatives. The biggest problem with Jason Griffith’s Sonic is that his relatively edgy delivery and off-putting inflections detract from the wholesome energy Ryan Drummond brought to the role, although the writing is often what contributes to the former. Something that also changed with the recasting has always separated Super Sonic from the Super Saiyans, which is that he’s still the same old Sonic personality-wise as opposed to screaming his lungs out like a maniac. Unfortunately, when voiced by Jason Griffith in Sonic X and Smash Bros. Brawl, he embraces his inner lunatic that never existed prior, and this was reiterated with Darkspine Sonic in Sonic and the Secret Rings because that was the first non-spinoff Sonic game to go full metalhead. It’s just a relief that he finally got a hold of himself in Unleashed.

I really don’t have much to hold against Tails’s voice actress aside from how much older she made him sound than he’s supposed to be, so we have to get into the recasting for Knuckles ASAP, because… oh, Christ on a cross, talk about ruining the essence of a character through your vocal performance alone. He sounded adequate in Sonic Adventure, albeit with the franchise’s signature cheese (although it did ignore the original concept of him being Rastafarian), but Sonic Adventure 2 was where the sweet spot was hit. His actor in that game and Heroes, Scott Dreier, really did a lot to mold the character into a smooth-talking tough guy, and his delivery has an unusually genuine and organic quality to it for a kids cartoon game. On that note, enter Shadow the Hedgehog, where we start to hear him voiced by a man named James Snyder (best known as Dan Green) who SEGA thought was acceptable despite his previous roles in multiple hent… I mean, Rem Lezar, and it becomes clear that zero notes on the character or his previous vocal performances were taken, as Knuckles literally transforms into a whole new character all of a sudden—that being a terrible one. Aside from Angel Island and the Master Emerald having been phased off his list of priorities with no reason given as to why, he inherits the unnatural inflections of Jason Griffith—a trend that I’ve never been able to explain, given the fact that these are native English-speaking actors—while sounding whiny, coming off as boisterous, and laughing like a mad scientist on the rare occasion that he does laugh. You know, I never thought in a thousand years that I’d say this in relation to Sonic, but thank the Lord for Idris Elba.

So far, I’ve already implied what I think of Jason Griffith as Shadow pretty strongly—which is that he pretty much abandons the character’s charisma and emotional depth, a fundamental problem that hasn’t been repaired to this day—so it’s worth analyzing what went wrong with female characters like Amy and Rouge. We can start with Rouge, as my gripes with her Grungy Anime Era voice actress aren’t nearly as strong, but it still defeats a critical component to what makes her a tastefully represented character. I made sure to explain that Rouge is only sexualized in terms of her appearance, but her actress from this era gives her a voice that’s dark like tinted glass, to quote “Short Skirt, Long Jacket” by Cake. Yes, it’s distinct, but it gives her more of this overly seductive and flirtatious edge than I feel like the character needs. It’s just too on-the-nose, whereas the character benefits from having other sides to her personality emphasized instead. In fact, since her modern voice is even higher-pitched than that of Lani Minella, it only serves to make a baffling mess out of her vocal evolution since her initial debut.

Now, like I said about Amy, I much prefer when she’s written and acted as snarkier and more assertive than she is sweet and excitable, hence why I consider her voice actress from this era to be the worst. She becomes so cutesy, in fact, that she starts feeling bad for the Egg Pawns for whom she’s never taken any shame in wrecking at any previous point in time, and that’s setting aside the inhumanly high-pitched and childlike tone that whittles her down to an archetypical anime girl all on its own. It makes me relieved to hear the way she’s portrayed in the Modern Era and Sonic Boom, as she sounds just as much like an adult in her twenties as Roger Craig Smith and Deven Christian Mack’s Sonics do.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 (Negative Example #2)

Before you even ask, I understand that I’m skipping over Sonic Riders to instead move onto the “big baddie” of this franchise. If my art design comment in the Sonic Heroes section didn’t suggest it enough, I never cared for Sonic Riders beyond the creativity of its concept (which actually sums up my feelings toward the majority of this era, come to think of it) due to how bland and obnoxious its original characters are, as well as the attempts to work a complex storyline involving mystical temples and gardens into what equates to nothing more than a futuristic hoverboard racing game—the Mario Kart games don’t have stories for a reason, and Team Sonic Racing at least kept its story minimal and barebones because nobody cares. Yes, I understand how ass-backwards that sounds coming from an aspiring writer who constantly thinks about fiction from a narrative perspective. Now, as a segue, Sonic Riders and Sonic ’06 are comparable in that I only played each of them for about a half-hour as a kid before giving up. Then again, they’re also radically different in that Sonic ’06 suffers from a complete and total lack of potential or even a reason for existing, as well as aiding in a human rights violation first perpetrated by Shadow the Hedgehog: making Eggman dull, which I’m fairly certain violates at least some articles of the Geneva Convention.

Then again, that may not be entirely true, as trying to revitalize the Adventure formula with its multiple playable characters, lineup of fresh new characters, variety of gameplay styles, top-tier-quality soundtrack, and complex story involving forgotten tragedies is by all means a noble attempt. Besides, I’d be lying if I said the soundtrack doesn’t reach an Adventure games level of quality at times, with stellar vocal themes like “His World” and “All Hail Shadow” as well as stage themes for Wave Ocean, Crisis City, Flame Core, Aquatic Base, etc. Even then, though, I like to treat the Recollected Cut of Shadow the Hedgehog as basically being the end of my own personal Sonic timeline, as even featuring Shadow at all after he’s been deprived of his trademark mysterious origins fails to pique my interest (the Storybook Series is an exception, as he takes on the role of a classic Arabian and English folklore character in those and therefore technically isn’t Shadow.) The problems are all in the execution—as viable as some of the character ideas introduced and reintroduced were, they were ultimately mishandled, and the rest of the ideas just aren’t particularly interesting anyway. I’ll be sure to describe the lack of originality in stage design compared to the rest of the series, among other issues, but one that needs to be addressed up front involves the character designs. I will admit, I’m at least happy that the human characters look more overtly realistic than the anime NPC design from Sonic Adventure (although I’ve always liked the way they were depicted in Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood), but the animal characters, i.e. Sonic and friends, have one recurring and unmistakably prominent quality in every one of them: the locations of their mouths. For some reason, every character from Sonic and Tails to Silver and Blaze has their mouth positioned on the very bottom of their lower face, meaning that if any of them had sculpted chins, they would be talking out of their jowls. Now, it’s true that Eggman’s updated design is significantly more hideous than any of the animal characters’ appearances… but that should speak for itself, so let’s just get as much of the story out of the way as possible, because that’s arguably the game’s greatest downfall.

Infamously, after the departure of Sonic Team’s lead director Yuji Naka, the game was rushed through development, with Sonic Team reportedly ignoring all of the bug fix notes provided to them. Despite the strange quirks and glitches of the gameplay, I don’t even consider those to be the worst of the game’s problems, or even the biggest problems with the gameplay itself. The story is the greatest offender, in my opinion, as I’ll struggle through the agony of condensing to the best of my abilities. Princess Elise of the Soleanna kingdom is almost kidnapped by Eggman during a festival celebrating the sealing of the “Flames of Disaster”, only to be rescued and carried to freedom by Sonic. While he’s distracted by a minimal number of robots, however, Elise is successfully kidnapped, and Sonic promises to find and save her before being tossed a Chaos Emerald… even though he knows exactly where she’s going. After reconvening with Tails, he wastes time running around the town talking to people until earning enough dough to buy the light shoes—an upgrade that he unlocked in Sonic Adventure 2, thus making it pointless to acquire them again. This is to cross a short body of water and reach the first stage, Wave Ocean, even though he can slide across the water’s surface after entering the actual stage. He moves at half a mile an hour until speeding up briefly during a “mach speed” segment, only for said segment to prove too little, too late when the third Egg Carrier flies over the shoreline. Stumped, the duo decides to give up on Elise’s trail and head back to civilization… even though an entire mountain range never stopped either of them from following the first Egg Carrier in Sonic Adventure.

Sonic finds and rescues Elise again from a desert palace, only to be ambushed by a hedgehog with telekinesis named Silver, who refers to Sonic as the “Iblis Trigger”, the one who will lead the world into a dark future. During their battle, Elise is captured once again, which you might as well get used to at this rate. Elsewhere in Soleanna, Knuckles lets Sonic and Tails know that they’ve been invited to Eggman’s base, presumably because they couldn’t make it there themselves. After they finally make it there, Eggman uses a time machine to whisk them all away, even though he needs all the Chaos Emeralds and the Flames of Disaster to unlock its full potential. Although he says the time and destination are totally randomized, they just so happen to end up in the same dystopian future as Shadow and Rouge. Shadow implies that the only way to leave this future is using Chaos Control, which Sonic deduces instantly even though the ability to time-travel using Chaos Control has never been established. As it turns out, Silver and Blaze the Cat from Sonic Rush (another game from this era that I completely skipped over, this time due to simple disinterest) were tricked into thinking Sonic was the Iblis Trigger when the real perpetrator, a Shadow-resembling god of darkness named Mephiles, intends on joining with the Flames of Disaster, AKA the fiery demon Iblis, to destroy the world. As Shadow and Silver discover within an underwater system after traveling ten years into the past, the former duke of Soleanna—Elise’s father—ran a time travel experiment, which somehow utilized a sun god named Solaris, AKA the Flames of Hope, and because this experiment brought rise to both Iblis and Mephiles, the two hedgehogs seal one inside a crystalline axe and another inside Elise, who was literally a child at the time, like the heroes of the future they are. In the end, Sonic gets killed by Mephiles, which causes Elise to cry, which releases Iblis into the world, which allows Mephiles to join with him, which brings about the resurrection of Solaris and plunges the world into…

…oh, you know what? Fuck it. At the end of the day, the Chaos Emeralds are collected around the world and used to revive Sonic along with a kiss from Elise—something that’s as notoriously creepy as it is nonsensical—thus turning him into Super Sonic, who then transforms Shadow and Silver into their own super forms. They defeat Solaris together, Elise almost lets the world burn so her and Sonic can be together, and the timeline is reset so none of the game’s events ever happened. Look, if you think from a narrative perspective as often as I do, you’d be able to tell that this game’s plot is (a) an overstuffed mess, and (b) about seventy-six-point-eight percent more jumbled than either of the two Adventure games. Aside from… you know, a moment that makes you go “what?” every couple minutes… one of the main reasons for this is that the chronology of story events is screwed beyond belief by the implementation of time travel. Just for some examples to understand what the hell I’m trying to say, Mephiles meets with Silver and Blaze before Silver first battles Sonic, yet Sonic sees this happen after his battle with Silver in his story; Mephiles copies Shadow’s appearance because Shadow sealed him inside his scepter ten years ago, even though he goes into the past to do so a while after Mephiles copies his appearance in his story; and Omega’s reminded that he’ll be reprogrammed to kill Shadow in the future, which he somehow knows even though it won’t happen for the next two hundred years. In other words, this story starts out on crutches, and it still finds a way to shoot itself in the foot as many times as humanly possible.

On top of that, the Adventure games had their own separate thematic focuses: Sonic Adventure was more focused on mythical gods and ancient civilization, and Sonic Adventure 2 was centered more on futuristic technology and scientific research. Whether you could or should try balancing out both focuses at once, Sonic ’06 did not do it well because it overcomplicated the story and muddled the emotional core as a result. Perhaps, the romance between Sonic and Elise was intended as the emotional core, but there’s good reason for why it’s left fans and players feeling little more than discomfort with the boiling intensity of a thousand suns. See, when the first Sonic game was being planned out in 1990, the idea of a human girlfriend for Sonic was brought forth, much like Pauline from the original Donkey Kong and Peach from Super Mario. So, what happened to her, you may ask? Well, obviously, she was scrapped in the end, and a replacement was offered years later in Sonic CD. That turned out to be Amy, who was and always has been a far better match due to being the same species. In other words, Sonic characters like Sara from the 1996 anime, Princess Elise, Shahra the Genie, and Merlina the Wizard are proof that Sonic Team has always been plagued by an obsessive-compulsive and paraphilic urge to develop sexual chemistry between human women and a male rodent.

Well, that’s quite a doozy of a flubbed story, alright, but in spite of the few story issues with the Dreamcast Era games, they at least feature quality characters to compensate for them, right? Well, (a) none of those games’ stories have the same surplus of issues as that of Sonic ’06, and (b) Sonic ’06 does not have quality characters. Even the ones who were quality. You have Sonic and Tails, one of my favorite fictional duos, coming off as clueless while Knuckles… well, I mean, how can you care about a character with a voice like the one Dan Green gives him? Hell, I haven’t even brought up all the obvious hints throughout the story that Team Sonic fails to take, like Eggman’s proclamation that he can alter the flow of time itself, as immediately after Shadow tells the team that they’re in the future, Tails shouts, “That means Eggman can control time!” Moreover, after Shadow clarifies that the future is “far removed from our own timeline,” Knuckles grovels over how it can possibly be their future. When he’s already been told it wasn’t. Moving onto the other characters, however, Amy is sometimes assertive but still somehow okay with her boyfriend cheating on her, and Shadow is the epitome of a wet blanket—arguably even more so than in the last game. Furthermore, all of his Chaos-based abilities do little more than make it clear that Chaos Control has no clear rules, and it’s even revealed that the same bracelet Rouge was given during Sonic Adventure 2‘s bittersweet ending was one of his two “inhibitor rings”. So, what happens when both are removed?

Well, he… uhhh… blows up everything behind him as he skates because explosions are CCCOOOOOOLLL!!! I guess.

“If the world chooses to become my enemy… I will fight like I always have!”

– A line that’s awesome to dumb people.

As always, I adamantly refuse to withhold my contrarian nature, this time by slamming new and returning characters that everyone else seems to love: Silver, Blaze, and Mephiles. There really isn’t a whole lot to say about Mephiles other than his weak motivations, uninspired resemblance to Shadow, and the most disastrous factor—his voice lent by Dan Green as the guy’s second terrible performance in the same game (no personal attack on him, of course). His one good moment made it into the Archie comics, where Scourge the Hedgehog storms out of the prison cafeteria, and we see Mephiles in an orange jumpsuit mumbling, “That guy needs to lighten up.” As for Silver and Blaze, they’re these two strange cases where everyone seems to like them for reasons that just aren’t there, namely their apparent identities as a futuristic warrior and princess, respectively, both of whom actually turn out to be insecure nerds who aren’t up to their own duties. The problem here is that this trait of theirs is never reflected here, as both characters are stone-faced bores with zero charm. I can see them working if their insecurities were reflected in their backstories as well as the things they said and did, and to be fair, that’s pretty much what they did with Blaze in Sonic Rush… only for to pretty much revert back to robotic boredom for this game. Then again, every character in this game couldn’t emote their way out of a paper bag, even when they find a close friend of theirs like Omega dead right in front of them.

To some extent, the IDW comics gave a touch of this to Silver, as he’s significantly more nervous and wholesome in that, but that hasn’t applied to him in any of the games until Team Sonic Racing, and there’s also the highly damaging factor of him being… ahem… an egregiously whiny and unlikable character in his writing and vocal performance. The only time that the game and I are ever on the same page is the money shot of Shadow freezing time to troll him mid-punch and ultimately roundhouse-kick him in the temple, a highlight that’s desperately calling for for a ten-hour loop.

When it comes to writing about a video game from a genre where story is rarely considered an integral component, I try to bring as much attention to the story as possible, but there’s no denying that the gameplay here is screwed beyond repair. Similarly to Heroes and my ability to look past its more bothersome qualities, there are plenty of people who don’t consider the gameplay here all that bad once you get used to it, so I’ll try to blend it together with the game’s general animation. You remember my lost media post here, when I discussed the long-lost animated film Quantum Quest, specifically the comparisons made between its animation and that of the notorious animated flop Foodfight? Well, I’ll give Quantum Quest some credit, as only chunks of it feel as stilted as Foodfight—the rest actually feels relatively fluid and consistent, and it has a bit of extra wiggle room in that department and budget-wise due to having been outsourced to Korea. Besides, it lacks the same flat and blurry visuals by looking sharper and more vivid by comparison. Sonic ’06, though? This is going to sound pretty savage, but Sonic ’06… this game really looks and moves like Foodfight. I’m not referring to the pre-rendered CGI cutscenes, which are about as visually breathtaking as Shadow the Hedgehog‘s while lacking the character models’ mouth placement issue. It’s the in-game animation where those models are used that I’m talking about, as the graphics were solid for the time, but the way the characters move is almost rubbery, like the way Woody from Toy Story moves (it works there because Woody’s a rag doll, so that’s exactly how his body should move.) The cutscenes are filled to the brim with this type of movement, but the gameplay animation suffers from similar… let’s call them oddities, notably certain playable characters’ walk and run cycles, as the way that Sonic runs is just… strange. Shadow skates as he should, and Silver… just kind of saunters around whenever he’s not levitating, but throughout the series, Sonic has a very specific pose when running, with only some variations between the Dreamcast and Modern Eras. His arms trail freely behind him, but they remain straight, and his legs move all the way forward and back in a way that sets him apart from the Naruto run that everyone thinks looks cool when it really just looks silly. For some reason, Sonic in this game holds his arms out toward his sides and keeps his hands wide open with the palms pointing behind him, making him look equally as ridiculous as Naruto.

In general, however, the most prominent issue with the gameplay animation surrounds the traversal speeds more than the bodily movements themselves, which could be looked past for new characters like Silver and returning characters like Knuckles, but I’m sorry—whoever thought Sonic and Shadow should travel slower than a jeep through a foot of sand had no idea what they were doing. It could’ve worked in Shadow the Hedgehog if that game was more primarily combat-oriented, but the inclusion of loop-dee-loops, dash panels, and other traditional Sonic stage elements in that game and this one renders that explanation obsolete and fails to justify the decision in any reasonable way.

Sonic Storybook Series (Negative Example #3)

I’ll admit—I’ve been pretty hard on Sonic ’06 and the lack of potential I believe it had… though, then again, I didn’t even get to the relatively low originality within its stage design, like Wave Ocean basically being Emerald Coast again (even the orca chase was replicated verbatim), the first act of White Acropolis copying the snowboarding sequence from Icecap, and Crisis City taking obvious liberties from Shadow the Hedgehog‘s city stages like Westopolis and Lethal Highway. On the other hand, in the case of the two major titles comprising what was retroactively named the Sonic Storybook Series—Sonic and the Secret Rings and Sonic and the Black Knight—I believe that they’re far more comparable to Shadow the Hedgehog than ’06 in that their concepts had a tremendous amount of creative potential, only to be severely mishandled thanks to cynical teenager-aimed writing, as well as a slew of strange and poorly thought-out decisions. Of course, we’re treading into somewhat uncharted territory, as these games aren’t nearly as universally scorned as the previous two, with players and critics relatively split on whether the games are forgettable duds or inventive new entries. My thoughts? Well, as far as I’m able to judge either of them, the latter applies to the overarching concept… but the former applies to basically everything else.

I believe that the core idea of these games has to be made clear and reiterated, because the unprecedented level of brilliance behind it (as well as the lack of believability that it could possibly fail) deserves attention. See, imagine if Sonic acquired an antique genie lamp, fell into another plane of existence, found himself in the ancient Middle East or the Kingdom of Camelot, and started noticing every friend of his embodying the role of a classic character from Arabian or English folklore, like Amy as Nimue or Knuckles as Sinbad. I’m not going to lie—I would play the hell out of that, possibly even now should it have prominently featured Sonic and Tails together or had more of a comedic edge that made a partial joke of the source material (don’t tell me Sonic Colors crossed with Monty Python and the Holy Grail wouldn’t be a winning formula!) Can you imagine the recurring inability to fit Eggman as a potbellied genie inside his lamp, or the duo taking on Merlin just to find out he’s simply Orbot and Cubot stacked in a wizard’s robe? Well, it sure is fun to dream, but what happened instead was Sonic getting strangely intimate with a female genie and sorceress while slashing his enemies apart and accompanied by hardcore metal music playing behind him. I suppose it’s fun if you’re a metalhead, but I unfortunately don’t fall into that category.

Yes, there are small bits of humor scattered throughout these games, but I feel like the weaker qualities tend to outweigh even the amazing idea of Sonic’s friends becoming mythical characters (they’re a tad more prominent in Black Knight than in Secret Rings, as the latter spends far more time on new characters like Erazor Djin and King Solomon), which just makes said idea feel all the more wasted. I should specify, however, that even as a kid, I never bothered to actually play either game, and I never would. This makes the whole topic as difficult for me to talk about as Rush or Colors, so most of what I’ll be setting my sights on relates to the execution of what I already know, which is… most of these games and their stories. Both stories begin with more or less the same basic premise of Sonic paradoxically crossing over into an alternate reality, which leads him to cross paths with a female guide (Shahra in Secret Rings and Merlina in Black Knight). In Secret Rings, he and Shahra must collect the seven World Rings for the main antagonist, Erazor Djin, Shahra’s father and a tyrannical genie who hopes to retell the stories of the Arabian Knights in his image. In Black Knight, Sonic must collect the swords wielded by the Knights of the Round Table (Shadow as Sir Lancelot, Knuckles as Sir Gawain, and Blaze as Sir Percival) to stop a corrupted King Arthur, only to learn that Merlina and her grandfather Merlin have manipulated him into helping them transform the world into a rigid, unchanging realm. Sonic also obtains additional guidance in the latter from a wisecracking sword (yes, that part is true), a proto-Excalibur of sorts named Caliburn. Admittedly, these games’ stories at least benefit from being streamlined compared to that of ’06, although Secret Rings does oddly give Sonic motivation to collect the World Rings by having him pierced in the chest by Erazor Djin with a fire arrow to save Shahra, and instead of this killing him on the spot, the power-crazed genie promises to remove it if he collects the World Rings for him. In other words, Sonic needs a self-serving reason to save the world instead of just being a selfless hero.

Surely, there are strange quirks to the gameplay of either game—notably the inability to move around freely, as the player can only stop and strafe backwards—but most of these are related to the Wii and the sporadic responsivity of its motion controls, so suffice it to say, I don’t have much experience (or care, for that matter) in this area. To be fair, I did used to watch videos of these games’ stories growing up despite never having experienced them firsthand, and the deciding factor to keep me away from them is the attempt to turn the Sonic franchise into an edgy teen adventure series with a swashbuckling protagonist and over-the-top action sequences. This rings true all the way through their final chapters, with Sonic and Shahra bringing the World Rings to Erazor Djin inside his palace at the end of Secret Rings, only for the genie to murder his own daughter and harness the Rings’ power for himself. Because he fails to fully harness them, he transforms into a disfigured demon called Alf Wayla-Wa-Layla (named after a Middle Eastern folktale saga), forcing Sonic to somehow also absorb the Rings and overcome him in a rage-fueled form known as Darkspine Sonic.

The final scene is a perfect encapsulation of where the tone of this series went wrong, as Sonic takes a seat on Erazor’s throne, angrily demands three wishes, and basically tortures the wishes out of him with his own lamp before trapping him back inside said lamp. It’s done with the mindset of Sonic being a badass action hero when, even during impressive moments like the time he cheats death in Sonic Adventure 2 using Chaos Control, he carries the same laid-back purity that defines who he is (and who his audience is) by design—having him topple the lead villain in such a ruthless manner goes against his very nature. I mean, seeing Darkspine Sonic scream bloody murder as he begs for Shahra’s power and smashes away at the peg on Alf Wayla-Wa-Layla’s back is just plain scary, and if there’s a character who you should never, ever feel afraid of, it’s Sonic the bright blue, child-oriented Hedgehog.

Black Knight‘s final chapter has a similar problem, with Sonic donning Excalibur and the solid gold armor of his Excalibur form as he dukes it out with Merlina’s Dark Queen alter-ego, but at least you get to hear “Seven Rings in Hand” during the final boss of Secret Rings instead of migraine-inducing crap like “With Me”. Never has a song begged for involvement from Crush 40 so badly, and those metalhead bastards actually made a cover, goddamn it!

That’s where we should segue into the last aspect of these two games that I have any real authority on: the music. I’m not going to lie to you, the soundtrack to Secret Rings is rock-solid, as it boasts a catalog of kickass numbers like “Let the Speed Mend It”, “High and Broken”, and “How it Started” that could actually compliment Adventure game stages rather well. My only problem lies in the fact that these were all done for a mainstream Sonic game, not a darker spinoff like Shadow the Hedgehog, and even great songs like “No Way Through”, “Blue on the Run”, and “It Has Come to This” are just too hardcore compared to, say, Emerald Coast and Metal Harbor. Now, as for Black Knight’s soundtrack, it takes that tonal enigma about fifteen steps further by simply banging way too hard. “Misty Lake” is pleasant enough, and a gorgeous acoustic cover of “It Doesn’t Matter” was recorded for it, but even quality stuff like “Knight of the Wind” is too much for this material.

“I will bring you pain and fear!”

– ???????????????

A Maverick Among Fans

It should’ve been made clear as day throughout the latter half of this overwhelmingly long post that I really don’t have much passion or affection for the vast majority of the Sonic franchise, as I only really hold three games dear to this day. Why is that? Am I a fraud? Am I not the fan I claim to be? Am I a maverick who does things his own way? Perhaps, the answer is yes, yes, and yes, but for the most logical solution, we can’t focus on where this post ended up, but rather where it began—it all started with five-year-old me, playing video games with relatives he’d only get to see less and less often as the years went on. It was about emotion, intrigue, the times spent with family, and the connections I formed with the things I loved, and I really did feel a connection to the three games I talked about earlier. Sure, my love for them led me to act like I loved all the other games as they came out, and I could only play Sonic ’06 for a half hour before realizing it wasn’t the Sonic I knew, but at this point, I’m old enough to analyze the series more critically without losing that initial connection. It’s just that I don’t have to cringe at Dan Green’s delivery with these three games, nor do I have to sift through a convoluted mess of a plot looking for a sign of reason that simply isn’t there, and nor do I have to feel bothered or overstimulated by the metal-accompanied sword fights between two angry talking rodents. No, my Definitive Childhood Sonic Trilogy isn’t perfect, but I don’t feel like I have to complain about them too much, either. If I can’t just relax and play the games from a franchise, and if I have to ramble on about how grungy, unfocused, and uninspired the later material has become over the years, then what’s the point?

So, yeah… at the end of the day, the answer is clear, which is that I’m not a Sonic fan. I used to be, but that’s long since passed. I’m a fan of quality entertainment, but not without the willingness to ignore inconsequential flaws if I can feel good and enjoy it. Hell, throughout the process of writing this, I’ve watched at least two longplays for GameCube games I used to play as a kid, and sure, many of them aren’t that great—a number of them are Super Mario games, and boy, do I have a lot to say about that series a couple posts from now—but that’s okay, because I formed similar emotional connections with them like the ones I formed with my Definitive Childhood Sonic Trilogy. Whether I’m watching longplays of these games or emulating them on Dolphin with an Xbox controller plugged in, it doesn’t matter as long as I can hear the sounds, listen to the music, watch the retro graphics, and control the low-poly characters because it all brings back feelings that would otherwise be long gone. In fact, between Smash Bros. 64, Dragon Ball Z: Budokai, and the smörgåsbord of obscure GameCube games me and my family used to play—from a Rugrats platforming adventure to a chaotic theme park management sim—I get the feeling this won’t be the last you’ll hear or see of them on this blog!