A Retrospective on my Sonic Retrospective
NOTE: This post serves as a conclusion to my Sonic retrospective which I have been working on since 2020. All Sonic retrospective reviews can be found here - https://expithecat.blogspot.com/search/label/sonic%20retrospective
Well, I’ve made it. I’ve reviewed all the mainline Sonic games and even a share of spin-offs that I wanted to talk about… but we’re here. I figured that after I finished writing my TSR review, I should do a little conclusion on my Sonic retrospective. Obviously I’m still waiting on Sonic Frontiers and will probably review that game when I have the chance, but for the time being… I’m done. I’ve completed my main goals with the Sonic retrospective and got a chance to relive the series as a whole.
I got the idea for a Sonic retrospective in late 2019. I first mentioned my idea for a retrospective in December of that year in the r/SonictheHedgehog Discord server. The previous year or two I had been doing game reviews on my Tumblr page (which I’ve now archived), including reviews for Sonic games, but I sort of felt like the quality of them was a bit… mixed. I wasn’t really doing any reviews in order - just whatever I felt like - and I wanted to, I guess… restart. Go from the beginning, and finally get myself to play through Sonic games I hadn’t played before or maybe played once a while ago. It especially helped since I was unemployed and in college, on top of being shut in my house all day in 2020 due to that virus going around.
On January 27, 2020, I posted my review of the first Sonic after replaying it for the billionth time, followed by my review of the second game a month later. I posted them to the r/SonictheHedgehog server, received feedback, and continued to improve on my writing style not just as I reviewed Sonic games, but more games and consoles in general.
It’s been about 2 and a half years now, and I have finally reached the point where I’ve played through all the Sonic games I wanted to play and talk about, occasionally dabbling in the spin-offs and more obscure titles. I’ll be honest, there were several times I considered canceling the project - often I felt like it was just too much for me to take on and would feel… burned out. Even when I got done reviewing the first game - my first review - I was still trying to figure out whether I wanted to keep doing this until I was done. It especially became an issue when I had to deal with school work, or as of last March, working an actual job.
This was also in addition to other projects I wanted to work on - including my own fiction series, a webcomic and a Youtube series based around a certain kid’s show involving talking trains with gray faces - so you can imagine with that workload there were so many instances of me just wanting to… give up.
But… I didn’t. I took breaks as needed, allowed myself to work up the motivation, then continued. I dedicated a lot of time to this retrospective - sure, I never really got a whole lot of people reading it, but that didn’t matter to me.
The past few years in the Sonic fandom in general, potentially even the past decade, have been a little… hectic, in a way. No one really seems to agree what the direction for the Sonic series should be going forward, or even what Sonic games were considered to be ‘good’. A lot of people lately have especially voiced dissatisfaction with the post-Colors era of Sonic, nicknaming it the ‘meta era’ and whatnot, particularly aimed at the writing style and tonal changes the game took in the past decade.
It’s through all of this where I wanted to give my own two cents. I didn’t exactly grow up with any specific ‘era’ of Sonic. My first official Sonic game that I played was Sonic 1 (...on the GBA) and later moved on to the Classic Collection on DS, before playing games like Sonic 4: Episode 1 and Sonic Colors on the Wii. That was also around the time I started getting more involved with the Sonic fanbase and looking at what other people were saying about each game on forum sites and YouTube.
In a way, the recent shift in the fanbase’s demographic is sort of… odd to me. I remember back then - Colors was perceived as the best Sonic game since Adventure 2 or Heroes, Black Knight was considered one of the worst games in the series, and Unleashed was generally agreed upon to have some really good Sonic stages versus some not-so-good ‘Werehog’ stages.
I feel like many of these takes still remain somewhat common among the more casual crowd, but in the Sonic fanbase in recent years, it seems like more people have voiced the opposite of the opinions I remember hearing growing up. This is likely a result of kids who played games like Unleashed and Black Knight growing up themselves and becoming a greater majority of the fanbase while older fans from the classic era have, well, moved on. Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not saying this is just a product of nostalgia, moreso a comment on paradigm shifts as people who grew up with these games saw them in a different light than the adults playing them as they came out.
That’s sort of where I come in. Keep in mind, I was born the same year that Sonic Adventure 2 released, and defining my childhood as being around the time I started, well, remembering things (about when I was 4 or 5) up to when I turned 13, that would put my ‘childhood’ between 2005/2006 up to early 2014.
As such, that would probably imply that I grew up around the late 2000’s Sonic games (the ‘Dark Age’) through the early 2010’s (the ‘Meta era’). But my experiences with the Sonic franchise go a bit deeper than that.
Truth be told, I’m not too sure how I got introduced to the Sonic franchise in the first place. With something like Mario, I do remember playing Super Mario World on my grandfather’s SNES when I was really young, but my earliest memories of the Sonic franchise largely stem from flash games I came across - something I kind of touched upon with my mention of Ultimate Flash Sonic in my review of Sonic Advance 2. My brother did have a GameCube and Xbox at a young age, but I don’t remember him playing games like the Sonic Adventure titles, Sonic Heroes or the Sonic collections that people often associate with Sonic games on those systems. Ultimately the earliest thing I can maybe remember was seeing the characters of Sonic and being like "hey that seems pretty cool."
I feel like my first memories with the actual Sonic games stem from when I was about 7-8 years old, give or take. I believe I mentioned in my Sonic 06 review that I remember my brother at least renting said game, but I don't remember actually playing it rather than just watching my brother play it.
The first official Sonic game I do remember playing on the other hand was Sonic 1… on the GBA. I remember my mother buying the game for me while we were at Toys R Us I believe around the time they were depleting their GBA stock. And while in retrospect that port is… kind of shit, I do remember loving the game as a kid. I didn't notice things like the slowdown, bugs and weird physics, but I loved the fast gameplay, levels, colorful visuals and the character of Sonic himself.
Ultimately however, I'd say the point where I got into the franchise and fanbase was with the Classic Collection for DS. My dad bought me the game while we were at a mall after I picked it out as a result of wanting to try the other Sonic games after playing the first game. I remember especially playing Sonic 2 practically on loop for months and considering that my favorite Sonic game for the longest time.
This was around the time Generations had released, and later on after getting my Wii for Christmas, I would pick up Sonic 4: Episode 1, Sonic Colors and even Sonic 1 for Master System via Virtual Console. And since then I would only continue to collect more games amassing the various consoles I collected alongside my Steam account.
I bring all this up to sort of tie back to what I was saying about people's opinions on the current state of the franchise. I'd say my "best" memories of Sonic growing up came from the years 2011 and 2012, around the start of the so-called "meta" era. I didn't play games like Generations, All Stars Racing Transformed or Lost World as they came out for one reason or another, but it was the time period I particularly remember when it comes to my peak memories with the Sonic franchise.
On that note, with this retrospective I wanted to give my own perspective on the Sonic franchise. Someone who basically went from the classic games straight to games like Colors and didn't necessarily experience the same tonal shift the series had from the "dark age" to the "meta era" as some would say. With a lot of the current disagreements and discourse surrounding the current state of the Sonic franchise, at least in the past 10 years, I wanted to offer my own perspective on the current state as someone who had a different history of the series.
In addition to that though, I also just wanted to experience each game again, or any of the games I hadn’t really played before. For the most part, I’d say my opinions on the games I played stayed relatively the same, but part of it too was exploring *why* I felt a certain way about a Sonic game and why I might have felt a different way about another Sonic game. Why Sonic Colors is still a great game all these years later, why Sonic Generations and Mania are my favorite Sonic games, and why Sonic 06 even without the glitches is still not very good, so on and so forth.
I’d say that the game my opinions changed the most after playing and reviewing it here was probably Sonic Heroes - for a while I had trouble going back to it due to the perceived ‘jankiness’ and whatnot, plus I didn’t like the idea of playing through the game four times to get the true ending - but I actually found myself really liking the level design and how the game controlled despite what I had previously felt prior to playing it. I might even go as far as to say I liked it more than either Adventure game - it’s still up in the air with the first Adventure since I did like that game’s approach to level design and control more, but on the same token Heroes doesn’t have many of the other not-so-great playstyles.
Would say I also enjoyed Rush Adventure more than I previously did although I hadn’t really played much of that game growing up despite having it so I don’t really know if that would count.
Even with the games I had never really played before, I still did hold some level of expectations for them. Some games were better than I expected, particularly in the case of both Sonic Boom 3DS games and Sonic Triple Trouble, and other games were… not as good as I was hoping they would be like Sonic Lost World 3DS and Knuckles’ Chaotix, with others being more in line with my expectations.
Doing this retrospective, more than anything, allowed me to experience the Sonic series again, probably for the first time ‘as a whole’, so to speak. I played through all the mainline games, dabbled into the spinoff territory, and overall got to understand why I liked certain games, why I didn’t like other games, and got to form my opinions on games I hadn’t quite played much of.
That said, I didn’t talk about every Sonic game out there - which I mean would probably be obvious considering that would take so much time hunting down every single Sonic game that’s ever existed, but there are definitely some that I probably could’ve played and reviewed but just… didn’t, and I wanted to go over a few of those here and give my two cents on them.
Sonic Spinball - I remember saying I liked this game in the past, but I kind of feel like it was more on an aesthetic and music level than anything. Actually trying to play this game is… frustrating. Thing is, I have never managed to get past the first level, Toxic Caves, since the game has sort of odd physics that aren’t exactly taught very well to the player, and quite frankly I just didn’t have the patience to try and understand how to play Sonic Spinball. I guess it can be somewhat fun to play as a casual pinball game without trying to get very far into it, but that’s about the best I can say. Between the two versions though I’d say the Genesis version is definitely better since it at least has a banger soundtrack (the options menu theme is awful though), but ultimately it’s not really a game I particularly enjoy nor do I have the patience to get over the game’s weird learning curve.
Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine - On the other hand, I do think this is a good Sonic spinoff… but the problem is that it’s just Puyo Puyo with Sonic characters, and that doesn’t exactly leave a very interesting review to talk about. I’m struggling even here to say much about the game so I’ll just say that if you like Puyo Puyo, you’ll most likely enjoy this game. Or, I guess, if you like Mean Bean Machine you should go play Puyo Puyo. I’d recommend Puyo Puyo Tetris 1 or 2 if that’s the case.
Tails’ Skypatrol - This is sort of a similar case to Sonic Spinball for me, although the learning curve isn’t as bullshit. Still, it’s not really a game that offers me enough to say about it nor have I really had any desire to play it.
Tails’ Adventure - On the other hand I am a bit more interested in playing *this* game. All things considered, it does seem like a very unique game, but I do kind of feel like how much this game deviates from traditional Sonic platforming, giving off more Metroidvania-ish vibes, I kinda didn’t really see myself being able to do this game justice. It’s definitely a different mindset as far as Sonic games go, although quite frankly I would love to see Tails have his own game again.
Sonic Labyrinth - I’ll be straightforward, I’ve tried to play this game multiple times and within 5 minutes I always end up coming to the conclusion that I actually kind of hate this. Sonic moves hella slow, which I know is a part of the plot, but even then he also controls so poorly when both trying to walk normally (not even just feeling slow but also stutter-y as hell) on top of the Spin Dash just feeling hard to control. One of my least favorite Sonic games hands down.
Sonic Shuffle - This was a game I intended to try and obtain when I bought the Sega Dreamcast, but that purchase sort of turned out to be a disaster since I ended up trying two Dreamcasts, both having issues, and ultimately just came off as a sign that maybe I didn’t need to invest in yet another older console for the time being. And as you can probably guess, I never obtained the game, but even if I had good luck with the Dreamcast, and I managed to find a copy of the game for a decent price… I don’t have any friends to play this with.
Being a more multiplayer-oriented game, I do feel like a lot of reviewers make the mistake of reviewing Sonic Shuffle as a singleplayer game. Although I… haven’t played this game before regardless, I can probably guess that the singleplayer experience isn’t very good. Thing is, that’s how I feel about games like Mario Party in the first place - let’s be real, even in Mario Party the singleplayer is just a complete RNG crapshoot, that’s just kind of the thing with this style of game rather than just Sonic Shuffle particularly.
Ultimately, it would’ve been more fair of me to judge this as a multiplayer game, but not only do I not have a lot of IRL friends, I don’t exactly think I could convince them to come over and play Sonic Shuffle on the Dreamcast with me. Also a lot of people brush this game off as a Mario Party ripoff… not realizing that this game was also co-developed with Hudson Soft. So really it’s more of a case of Hudson Soft ripping off themselves.
Sonic Battle (and by extension, Sonic the Fighters) - In the case of Sonic Battle, it was one game that I sort of feel I probably should’ve reviewed, as there is some connection with Advance 3, which I did play and review. But the reason I didn’t review Sonic Battle, which is also a similar reason why I didn’t play Sonic the Fighters, was that both games aren’t really in a genre that I’m much experienced with. I have played my share of fighting games in the past, especially the Super Smash Bros series of course, but it’s never really been a genre I’ve really found myself very invested in. It’s more of a genre where I can enjoy playing a couple rounds, but not really much more than that.
I guess you could make the argument that I also reviewed Sonic Unleashed, which half the game, the Werehog, was also a genre that I wasn’t at all experienced with, but the thing is Sonic Unleashed is still very much treated as a ‘mainline’ game, that still has a good amount of emphasis on Sonic’s core gameplay and the ‘Boost’ formula, with the Werehog just being a playstyle in the same vein as the Treasure Hunting in SA1 and 2. With Sonic Battle and Sonic the Fighters, the ‘fighting’ gameplay *is* the gameplay, and both games are without a doubt in the spinoff territory, even if Battle does have connection to Sonic Advance 3. And as someone who’s not very into fighting games as it is, I do get the impression that I wouldn’t be giving either game a fair shake.
Sonic the Hedgehog: Genesis - I sort of bring this one up since I actually almost did review it - even going so far as playing through it. Problem is, aside from addressing my experiences with this as my first official Sonic game, I don’t exactly feel like I would’ve contributed much to what had already been said time and time again. It’s a bad port - one I have nostalgia for, but still a bad port. Literally everything that I can say about the game can be said in one or two lines - there’s glitches, the physics are completely off, the game’s full of slowdown, screen crunch, and the music is awful. Quite frankly, I just couldn’t work up the motivation to write a review of this game, even after playing it, that wouldn’t just sound like I was parroting what everyone else who has reviewed this game said.
Mobile Sonic Games (Sonic Dash, Sonic Runners, etc) - This is another case of me just being a part of a genre (or moreso platform) that I’m not a huge fan of or can even say much about. The mobile games just have a huge level of simplicity that makes a lot of them really hard to talk about especially when in comparison to the mainline games. Some of them can be a decent time waster, like Sonic Dash, but nothing really much more than that. They don’t really add much to the franchise in terms of lore or anything nor do they really offer anything for me to talk about.
The Mario & Sonic Games - Like the mobile games, these can be decent timewasters, but not much else. I do remember the DS version of 2010 Winter Olympic Games offering a story mode, but even then, this is also in a genre I’m not too into or could really give much of a shake for.
But okay, we got all that out of the way, and I wanted to finish this post in two parts. For one, my favorite and least favorite reviews.
My favorite reviews would probably be the ones I wrote for Sonic Adventure 2, Sonic Colors, Sonic Generations, and Sonic Forces.
Sonic Adventure 2 was a game I reviewed two times prior, first on a pony forum site and the second time on my Tumblr page. But in both cases, I don’t really feel like those reviews truly communicated my feelings about the game in a solid way. The first review I did was basically just ProJared’s review except even more overly-simplified, and the second review… I kind of tried to balance my opinion of the game a bit more, but I felt like it was a bit too in favor of the positive side that it didn’t exactly tell what my true opinions of the game were.
The one I did for this retrospective was one where I legitimately felt like I nailed how I felt about the game. It wasn’t just a case of just “1/3rd of the game is good”, I talked about what I liked and disliked about the Speed and Treasure Hunting gameplay, especially in comparison to the first Sonic Adventure, and did a better job telling why I didn’t care for the Mech Stages. Ultimately, the review allowed me to finally understand what my opinions of Sonic Adventure 2 were - I think the game’s good, but not as amazing as some Sonic fans say, but I respect those who love the game and understand that it did make an impact on the franchise and its audience.
I liked my Sonic Colors and Generations reviews for rather similar reasons. In the end, I was mostly just talking about why I loved those games, addressing why they were so positively received, and why in my opinion they’re still so good now - which I think was especially something I wanted to do for Colors in an era where people have questioned it’s quality, especially as the beginning of the current direction of the series.
Sonic Forces was, surprisingly, my longest review, and I really felt like I did a good job analyzing the game in-depth and why I enjoyed it while so many didn’t. I addressed some of the misconceptions about it’s development, and really took the time to understand what Sonic Team was going for with its level design rather than just brushing it off as ‘lazy’, ‘too straight/linear’ or whatever. In a similar case to my Sonic Adventure 2 review, my Sonic Forces review allowed me to understand why I liked the game after… sort of being able to give a straight answer to that. Granted, my answer was anything but straight, but at the same time, it did give me a better understanding of what I liked about Forces, while acknowledging the places it didn’t exactly nail it.
My least favorite reviews were probably the ones I did for Sonic Jam for Game.com and Sonic Unleashed Mobile. These reviews I kind of just did to play into the suggestions of other people reading my reviews, sort of as a joke, and the result is that both of these reviews… kind of just came off to me as myself just talking about precisely what I expected from the games. Sonic Jam for Game.com feels like a bootleg with bad controls, physics and music, and Sonic Unleashed Mobile is a mediocre mobile platformer… what else did I really have to say from that?
I also don’t think I did a good job with my Sonic CD or 06 reviews for… similar reasons. I did agree with the conclusions I was making for those games, and where my criticisms were stemming from… I just don’t think I exactly *communicated* those criticisms very well. With 06 I kind of felt like I spent way too much time talking about the ‘amigo’ characters and mostly just repeating the same criticisms of them, and I didn’t do a good job of going in much depth of why I didn’t like the level design or the game’s controls.
I definitely could have talked more about how the combat felt monotonous, and how the level design often just felt empty in terms of both the more open play fields and linear pathways, in some cases just as if not more automated than Forces, and just feeling like a hodgepodge of dull, empty areas on top of controls that didn’t exactly do a great job of allowing the player to take much advantage of the level design. Maybe I’m just being too hard on myself with that one, and maybe I just didn’t have much else to say, but… I dunno.
My Sonic CD review, again, I felt like I had the right idea of what my criticisms were, I just didn’t communicate them very well. I’ll just say this - I actually feel like I did a better job talking about my issues with Sonic CD’s level design in this Twitter thread I made not long after playing the game in Sonic Origins: I think my issue with Sonic CD’s level design in general is that it feels like it tries to encourage you to explore the level while still trying to keep a sense of speed and platforming by sort of just plastering design elements everywhere.
but then you have levels with too much going on (Wacky Workbench) or levels that feel too vertical and empty (Quartz Quadrant). As a result both the exploration and speed platforming aspects feel negated to an extent.
In a nutshell, I don’t think it was necessarily that Sonic CD doesn’t feel ‘speed based’ as I stated, with Time Attack in the 2011 and Origins versions giving you an opportunity to try and speedrun the stages, moreso that the game didn’t do the best job of balancing the exploration and speed elements, and some of the game’s levels either felt like giant hodgepodges of enemies and hazards, or just being pretty dull with little going on.
…I also stated that Sonic CD didn’t have enough enemies but that’s the exact opposite problem the game’s level design has.
But at the end of all of this, I just want to say my thanks to some people.
Thank you to the r/SonictheHedgehog Discord server for giving me the idea for this project, and to the members that engaged in discussion with me leading up to each review, correcting me on some things I might have gotten wrong regarding the development or the games’ workings, or even providing me some rebuttal on my criticisms - allowing me to expand upon them and have a better understanding of the game itself.
I also want to thank my friends who I shared my reviews with on other Discord servers and Twitter, and also provided some feedback and two-cents on the games and/or my reviews.
Above all else though… thank you. The person reading this right now, yeah, you. I didn’t really get a whole lot of views on my blog, but I am glad that some people were at least somewhat interested in reading what I had to say throughout all of this.
I plan on also making a statement about the future of this game review blog sometime down the road for those interested, but for the time being, I’ll just leave with one thing to say, and that’s…
Bring on Sonic Frontiers!
Comments
Post a Comment