everybody's rushin': Sonic Rush (Nintendo DS, 2005) Review

 NOTE: This review is part of a retrospective of the Sonic franchise. Feel free to read the other Sonic reviews I’ve done here - https://expithecat.blogspot.com/search/label/sonic%20retrospective

SONIC COLORS ULTIMATE ANNOUNCED LESS FUCKIN GO!!!

Background and History

Like previous handheld entries (in the 2000’s), Sonic rush was developed in part by Dimps. Prior to it’s release, there was a demo game for the DS titled, well, “Sonic DS,” in which the player rubbed the DS touch screen back and forth to make Sonic go faster. As far as I can tell this demo didn’t really go anywhere - most likely it was a demo created solely for E3 and even if that wasn’t the case it definitely didn’t move forward in development. Granted I don’t really think that’s a huge loss considering I don’t really see how a Sonic game where you just rub the DS screen back and forth would be good or fun at all, but whatever.

But either way, Sonic Rush would begin development and was revealed at E3 2005. The game took some advantage of the DS - particularly using the dual screen functionality together to make levels appear bigger. And the game received positive reviews, no real need to go too in depth here.

Personal Experiences

Once again, my personal experiences aren’t too interesting with this one. This was a game that got my attention during my early days of the Sonic fandom - back when I only really had a DS, Wii and Xbox 360 I did hold interest in this game and did consider getting it at some point, albeit I didn’t really do so until 2019. Although funnily enough I did ask for the game for Christmas in 2012 but instead got Sonic Rush Adventure, the game’s sequel. It wasn’t a big deal to me, but in 2019 I found the original Sonic Rush at my local game store and decided to go ahead and pick it up.

I first played it during the summer of 2019 and… truth be told I was kind of mixed about it at first. Granted I was kind of going through a lot at the time, but at the same time I was pretty critical regarding this game’s level design in particular - feeling it was too trial-and-error heavy and ultimately I did feel frustrated with it at times. That said, especially with this review series, I did want to go back and give the game another chance - in retrospect I felt I had been too hard on it and thought I would maybe enjoy it more if I went back to it a second time. And well, now that I’ve played it again and am reviewing it, let’s see if that does hold.

Story

Blaze the Cat, a new character, is pulled into the dimension where Sonic and his friends live from her own, after chasing Eggman who stole the seven ‘Sol Emeralds’ - her dimension’s equivalent of the Chaos Emeralds. With the Sol and Chaos Emeralds being in the same dimension, this has the consequence of collapsing both worlds if not taken care of. Meanwhile, Sonic himself is searching for the Chaos Emeralds, which have been stolen by Eggman Nega, the version of Eggman from Blaze’s universe.

I would probably consider this game’s story a step above previous handheld titles. Granted I feel like that’s partially a result of having a lot of in-game text, and it’s still not the deepest story even as far as Sonic games go, but it does have a bit more to it than the Advance games as far as character interactions and whatnot go.

Sonic Rush introduces the character of Blaze, who is honestly one of my favorite characters in the franchise. That might be slightly pushed due to my personal bias towards cat characters in general, but I think especially here, it’s interesting seeing her character arc - an antisocial, introverted individual finding herself in an unknown place who pushes herself to do things her own way but figures out the importance of making friends. She’s actually sort of relatable for me and I’m sure others, and even in other games, she always kind of had a mysterious feel to me and I think it makes her character all the more intriguing.

And also with how many people talk about how they wish for other characters to be playable, I think especially within the context of the Boost gameplay, it would definitely be interesting to see her character playable again in the future.

As far as Sonic stories go I think this is overall a good one. Nothing too particularly deep, but does have it’s share of good elements. I guess my only real criticism would be on a presentation that relying on in-text dialogue does make it harder to really “get into,” but at the same time considering the DS wasn’t exactly the most powerful system out there, it’s not really that big of a deal to me.

Presentation

For a DS game I think Sonic Rush looks pretty good. To be honest, even when just looking at footage of this game around 2012 or so, I always liked the 2.5D models of Sonic and Blaze, albeit oddly enough they are the only “3D” models in the game aside from all the bosses and some of the stage mechanics (like springs). The game actually combines the 2.5D style with sprite-based work for all the enemies and whatnot, and I actually feel the way they did it here works pretty well. Honestly I didn’t even really notice that initially, and obviously with the limited power they had, they managed to make it all really fit together with the game’s color palette and whatnot.

And the soundtrack is definitely one of my favorites. The composer of the game, Hideki Naganuma (who is quite the memer on Twitter), also worked on Jet Set Radio, and while I haven’t played that game, from what I’ve heard, Sonic Rush definitely gives off that vibe. I’m not really sure what music genre Sonic Rush’s soundtrack would fit into - trip hop, maybe? - but I always found it to be a very unique style that really appeals to me. I could definitely see myself listening to this game’s soundtrack on my own time.

Gameplay

In my Sonic Advance 2 review, I talked about how the game tried to replicate Sonic Adventure 2’s speed-based level design into 2D, which was an interesting take on 2D Sonic gameplay, but I had issues with it - it really felt a bit too trial-and-error heavy and the limited view of the Game Boy Advance screen really didn’t help much.

I bring this up largely because Sonic Rush feels like another attempt at that. But at the same time, it does evolve that idea quite a bit. Sonic Rush, in a lot of ways, is sort of a predecessor to the “Boost” formula that would be present in Unleashed’s Day stages, Colors, Generations and Forces - essentially the “dominant” formula of the 2010’s. On top of the greater emphasis on speed, you also have a “Boost” gauge that brings Sonic at his max speed but needs to be maintained by doing trick jumps and defeating enemies. 

In a lot of ways, I actually feel like Rush does a better job of being a 2D speed/spectacle-based platformer than Advance 2. One issue with Sonic Advance 2 was that the way level design was structured just felt a bit repetitive to me. A lot of the time I just felt like I was going down slopes and hills and in general it didn’t feel very… dynamic to me. I’m not really sure if I worded that the best, but I think I did get my point across.

While Rush isn’t perfect either - and I will talk about that - I do feel like as a speed-based game, level design does feel more interesting and dynamic here. In general I just felt like there was more going on - I didn’t really feel like I was just going down slopes half the time and I feel some of the gimmicks of each level did make them stand out from each other a bit more, even if not all those gimmicks were a hit. 

On top of that, I feel the added movement options really helped here. The boost/tension gauge really encourages the use of trick jumps and defeating enemies and helps keep a flow of each level going in addition to the trick jumps, ramps and rings. The ranking system also plays a part here - from what I can tell this was the first 2D game to utilize this after the concept was introduced in Sonic Adventure 2 and it does incentive replaying the levels and taking advantage of the movement options and level flow this game offers.

In general I feel Rush does introduce a lot of interesting ideas that make the concept of a 2D speed-based platform work rather well. But there are some issues I have with the level design that do bring it down a bit for me. While I did enjoy this game a bit more after playing it for this review, there were still things that I remembered were part of why I was sort of mixed about it my first time playing.

This game does bring back a lot of the signature Dimps design tropes that did plague the Advance titles - especially Advance 2. One thing being, well, the bottomless pits. These are plentiful in this game and often really felt cheaply placed to the point where in some cases I felt like the game was punishing me for going fast. With the way this game is played you develop a habit for maintaining speed and flow, but sometimes I found myself missing platforms and following into pits that I just didn’t have enough time to react to. Other times I was making leaps of faith or just didn’t know where the game wanted me to go before I found myself falling into nothingness. It’s especially bad when this game has some really noticeable “do or die” situations where if you make one wrong move, you fall into a bottomless pit and lose a life. It isn’t so bad early on, especially towards the second half of the game, Sonic Rush can be *really* unforgiving, and I feel that’s what somewhat turned me off on my first playthrough of it.

Another thing I should mention is some of the platforming in this game, which also allows me to touch upon the controls. While this game does control well when you are going fast, there are still times where you have to slow down and perform some platforming. And as far as performing slow platforming jumps in this game goes, it doesn’t feel very good. The movement at slow speeds just feels really awkward and stiff, and it doesn’t help that some of the platforming requires jumping on small platforms that are spaced narrowly between one another. 

Now, the game offers two playable characters - Sonic, of course, and Blaze the Cat. Both of these characters do play similarly to each other, but have some different movement options between them. Probably the biggest thing I noticed was that Sonic himself has a Homing Attack as per usual, however Blaze doesn’t. When you press the button to homing attack - which is the D-pad + R button in this game (which I found odd and initially caused me to not notice there was a homing attack in this game, but whatever), she will instead perform a short hover, which actually does make platforming feel a bit better in this game and in some cases did save me from falling into bottomless pits.

Between the two I kind of preferred playing as Blaze due to her moveset, although in Blaze’s story the levels don’t follow the same order as they do in Sonic’s story and that did make for a pretty strange difficulty curve. The last couple levels do follow the same order but the rest are placed in a way that really made me feel like the game’s difficulty curve was primarily made for Sonic’s story and Blaze was sort of an afterthought. 

On that note though, I gotta admit that this game, like Dimps’ other titles and some of the other games in the series during this time period, felt sort of padded to me. You can play as just Sonic or Blaze, but there’s a “true ending” to it that is unlocked by not only playing through both Sonic and Blaze’s stories, but also requires you to get the 7 Chaos Emeralds as Sonic. Fortunately collecting the Sol Emeralds as Blaze pretty much just requires playing through each zone and beating each boss, so you don’t necessarily have to play through each special stage twice, but that sort of thing is still present here.

To give some credit, unlocking the true “final boss” and ending isn’t quite as annoying here as it was in any of the Advance games, Shadow the Hedgehog or even Heroes. You still have to play through the game once as each character, but since there’s only two playable characters here you really only need to play the game two times, and in addition getting the Chaos Emeralds is nowhere near as tedious as it was in the Advance games. 

To access each special stage, you need to find one of the special generators in each zone, grab onto it and boost for long enough. The special generators themselves are actually surprisingly easy to find, and I guess it did sort of annoy me when I didn’t have enough boost to enter the special stages but considering the game does give you a lot of opportunities to build your boost gauge that really wasn’t too much of an issue.

And the special stages themselves… well, they are the half-pipe again, which is a bit overused, but at the same time they aren’t too hard. You actually have depth perception unlike in, say, Sonic 2 or Pocket Adventure and collecting and holding onto rings is easy enough. The only thing that really rubbed me the wrong way was the use of the touch screen - which itself wasn’t a huge issue but it did sometimes feel like my hand was blocking the screen and making it hard to see some things. But overall the special stages aren’t too annoyingly difficult… until you get to the seventh special stage.

I’ll be honest, most of the other special stages were pretty much a cakewalk - I did have to replay the fifth and sixth ones a couple times after losing but it didn’t take too long. But the seventh is where the difficulty curve just becomes an outright difficulty cliff - bombs are scattered everywhere and with how they are placed, trying to move out of their way is definitely really hard. The only way I even beat this special stage was through “pause buffering” - where if you pause the game, and move the stylus over to another location, Sonic would almost instantly move to that location. But even when doing that, I still needed to keep replaying the special stage and I barely even managed to beat it when doing pause buffering to the best of my ability.

And the “true” final boss itself is… eh. In general I do find the bosses of this game to be pretty dull - pretty much all of them consist of a pattern of just waiting through a bunch of different attacks until the boss gives you a chance to hit it one time. Admittedly bosses have never really been this series’ strong suit, but Rush’s bosses were particularly just a bore to me.

And as for the final boss itself, it’s another case where it’s the only time you can use Super Sonic, and all you really do is fly through some obstacles until you get a chance to hit Eggman and Eggman Nega. You play as both Sonic and Blaze taking turns (kind of like the Final Lizard in Adventure 2 where you alternate between Sonic and Shadow), and with Blaze it’s easy enough since you do have an attack ability, albeit with Sonic you have to knock projectiles back into the boss. Which, frankly, can be pretty tedious - with how the boss and the projectiles are always moving I found it really difficult to land precise hits, but eventually I got it nonetheless.

Conclusion

Overall, I would definitely say Sonic Rush is a good continuation of the Advance trilogy that does feel like a step up from Advance 2 as far as being a 2D speed/spectacle based game. However, especially with being the first to use this sort of formula, there were still things that needed to be improved - particularly with the level design and platforming. But with there being later Rush games - particularly Rush Adventure in 2007 and Colors DS in 2010 - I will eventually see if those games solve my criticisms. But before I do that I have a couple… other games to review. One of them being one of the series’ most infamous and causing lasting damage to the franchise’s reputation… but of course, we’ll get to that one.

Overall though, Sonic Rush is a good game, and I would say I did get my share of enjoyment out of it, but it needs some improvements and it’s formula definitely has the potential to be fleshed out. Regardless, I would recommend it - it is a solid title that can feel very exhilarating. Unfortunately it hasn’t been ported to anything since it’s original release, so you will need a DS or 3DS to play it (or, y’know, an emulator), but if you can I would say it’s at least worth a shot.