Sonic the Hedgehog (2006)

---

Sonic the Hedgehog is a 2006 platform video game developed by Sonic Team and published by Sega for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. The game primarily allows the player to use Sonic, Shadow and Silver across several stages. Other secondary characters also become playable across the game. The plot follows Sonic's quest to protect Princess Elise after she is kidnapped by his rival Dr. Eggman and is aided by new and returning allies.

The game shares its name with two earlier Sonic games, a manga, a television series, a comic book series, and their eponymous main character. To disambiguate, the game has been referred to as Sonic 2006. It was produced in commemoration of the 15th anniversary of the Sonic the Hedgehog series. The game faced multiple issues during development, which resulted in rushing the product despite existing bugs. Both versions were heavily criticized for long loading times, poor camera system, gameplay glitches, complicated plot and sloppy character control.

---

This is rather long, so if you're very familiar with the game and the popular reception of it, you might want to skip to the end and just share your own thoughts.

So I played this game sometime early last year, and I specifically went out of my way to borrow a copy from a coworker who'd picked it up for his kids and it had basically been hardly played. I'd seen the famous Pokecapn Posse LP and seen a bit of the Game Grumps' LP, but I had to know for myself if it was really bad as they all said it was. I forced myself through the entire thing, beginning to end, all three story-lines and the finale. The awful, awful finale. But that's getting ahead of myself.

So straight up, from the very beginning, the cutscenes are cringeworthy - introducing a female princess into the story in a horrible mashup between Mario and Final Fantasy in a setting of Not Quite Venice was an atrocious idea, and I'm going to put story mostly aside because it's absolutely incoherent garbage for the most part. I'm just going to say that as an enthusiast of time-travel fiction, the time travel in this game makes no fucking sense, is totally inconsistent, and the best thing about it is that the last major event of the game is Spoiler Seriously!

So once you're finally past the hurdle of the fiction, you have the actual game to contend with. Sonic games are - were? - generally known for their strong opening levels, but this one dumps you into a plaza with hilariously bad controls that have you zooming uncontrollably all over the place from awkward human NPC to NPC. Floating hints from a narrator shunt you around - you eventually figure out that to get to the first actual level, you need the Lightspeed Dash, a 3D sonic staple that lets you zoom along lines of rings to travel over dangerous terrain like instant-death water - an element that surrounds the entire main hub and will be a perpetual annoyance throughout the entire game. However, you don't have it, you need an item called a Light Chip to use it, which is sold by a random vendor. The nearby hint suggests that you can buy it "with the money". Money? Huh? The old man next to the store wants you to try out some shoes. You say yes, you get a long load time - and there's already been multiple long loading times just getting from cutscene to cutscene - so the old man can say one more line about testing his shoes, and then ANOTHER loading as it brings up an actual short mission. This is a recurring pattern throughout the game - loading an entire area for 20-30 seconds to play one line of non-voiced dialogue, and then loading an almost identical area for the actual gameplay content. It's an absolutely awful bit of design.

Your first mission is to run through the rings from Superman 64. I wish I was joking; they took the worst part of one of the worst games of all time and made it a recurring minigame, and then made it the very first piece of actual gameplay you experience. Beat that - and it ends extremely abruptly as you pass the last ring - and the game loads again, the old man congratulates you and gives you his "custom shoes", and then it loads again to finally bring you back to the hub. Now thanks to whatever letter-grade you received on the mission you have a whole bunch of rings you can use to buy the lightspeed dash - oh, that 'money' - to finally cross to the actual first level. Likely what will happen is you'll go to the long trail of rings, try to use it, and then fall into the water. Possibly more than once. It's temperamental and often sends you flying the wrong way. It's outright infuriating trying to play this game. To this you can add severe frame rate drops and stutters, often in the middle of action set-pieces or just moving around the town hubs.

The first level is actually okay - lots of set-piece loopdeloops, homing attacks, but you're likely to encounter a handful of the awful physics glitches. And don't die too many times, or you might learn the horrible truth - Sonic 2006 doesn't have autosaves. That means if, like most players, you haven't saved up until this point because the game hasn't prompted you to - you'll need to restart from the beginning again. All the cutscenes, all the loading times, the stupid ring mission, everything. That's easily 20-30 minutes, maybe shorter if you're lucky. The first level also contains the worst type of sublevel in the game - mach speed zones. These aren't a bad idea inherently, but their implementation is shockingly awful - Sonic automatically runs forward at a fixed high speed, and all you can control is his bearing and jumps. These go so fast and pop-in is so bad you're likely to collide with anything and everything, and EVERYTHING does damage, losing all your rings, be is a solid surface or the fence you're trying to run alongside. You can easily burn through your limited lives here, and even if you pick one up, it doesn't respawn each time you die - a conscious decision by the developers as no other pickup acts this way.

So eventually, you beat the first level. Your payoff? "Damn, the bad guy got away. We should go back to the city and look for clues". That's right, the entire level was narratively pointless - it feels like the area was built totally independently from any sort of framework and just thrown in there. And that's how they introduce you to the game. Most of the game proceeds in this manner - villain spotted in an area, do trivial challenges in the hub to unlock the warp to the area, do the stage, make little to no meaningful impact on anything, come back. Even when you do progress the plot, it often feels entirely unrelated to your actions and that's true in all three characters' stages.

Now at this point I'm gonna take a break to praise a few things. This game has great music. I mean seriously, I put some of it into my regular playlists, it's genuinely and unironically great. Some stages are almost actually enjoyable in and of themselves. I particularly enjoyed Radical Train, although I think being familiar with it from the Posse LP helped a lot. The boss designs aren't great but they're relatively enjoyable to overcome compared to the levels themselves. There's a lot of interesting ideas in each level, things that mix it up, and the secondary characters you sometimes necessarily switch to have interesting mechanics - although some of them feel rushed or badly thought out, especially Tails' flight and Fake Ring Bombs. The wall-crawling and gliding mechanics in particular are genuinely fun, but still suffer from glitches catching onto or being unable to jump from surfaces. Silver as a character is interesting - while not as fast as the other two playable hedgehogs, he works with physics objects, basically being a living gravity gun and solving physics puzzles - which tend to glitch out, too. Good ideas like a "golf" puzzle moving a ball around with limited hits descend into frothing madness due to the unreliable and buggy counter/timer.

I think that's the biggest issue the game has - everything is badly unpolished. If you cut down the story massively and gave the team another six months, I think this game actually had the potential to be fun. Some things like Sonic's special gauge are outright unfinished. The whole game literally feels worse than the sum of its parts, because every issue impinges on the enjoyment of something else - the moment you find something good, you'll be hampered by the bad/squeaky voice acting, the frame rate drops, the physics issues, the terrible narrative, or using up all your lives on a nonsensical hazard. If this wasn't bad enough, you have to replay the whole game three times - every stage must be done once as each of the three main characters, and some stages have to be played partially again as a secondary character like Amy or Blaze. Survive all that and get all three endings, and you'll unlock the true ending, the finale.

The finale epitomizes all these issues, a little recap and encapsulation of everything that is wrong with Sonic 2006. In the second dumbest cutscene, Sonic is outright murdered by Shadow Satan and the princess cries, unleashing the sealed evil that is the fiery other half of Super Solar Satan. Then you have to play 7 short stages, reprising the worst parts of many levels throughout the game, as the two living hedgehogs and 5 side characters, using all of their gimmicks and glitches. During this, two new instant-kill enemy types appear and throw the physics engine's worst at you, on top of the instant-kill platforming. Lose all your lives on any one of these 7 stages - each with their own long loading times - and you have to go back to the beginning of this whole process. Your reward for beating these is the single dumbest cutscene in the game, Sonic resurrected, followed by an awkward an inexplicable boss fight using unintuitive and barely explained flight mechanics and a set of timers you can basically ignore provided you remember to switch character, in a throwback to Sonic 3 & Knuckles' Doomsday Zone but without the tension, brilliance, or a fraction of the feeling of intensity (it does have pretty good music, though).

It took me a week or two to play through it all. It was, in all honestly, not a good game - it was extremely bad - but the experience taught me a few things. It taught me that there was in fact a good game struggling to be expressed under all the awfulness. It taught me that rushed production for christmas is absolutely always a terrible idea and cannot be justified, and even if you do you should never stake your entire brand identity on the result. But the main thing I walked away from it with was the knowledge that Sonic 2006 is certainly not the worst game of all time, but it's probably one of the most noteworthy in its multitude of failings. It's a perfect case study in how to not make and design and assemble a triple-A game for the console market, how not to use and manage your characters and premier license, and how not to tutorialise gameplay, and many many, many, many other lessons learnable.

Sorry for the wall of text, but I feel like I've finally gotten my thoughts on this game off my chest. For some additional context, I grew up playing the Sega Mega Drive (Genesis), in particular Sonic 1-3, and had already played and absolutely loved Sonic Generations by the time I played Sonic 2006, although I was never a fan of the early 3D Sonics on the Dreamcast/Gamecube.

Some question prompts:

• What was your experience of this game?
• Did you play it when it came out, or when you were young? How does that colour your experience of it?
• What is your relationship with the Sonic franchise?
• What could have been done to salvage the game, if anything?