Your Everyday Nerd

With the advent of Sonic Origins, I have finally conquered my personal white whale in gaming – beating Sonic the Hedgehog.

I feel like everybody has some kind of personal connection to Sonic. He was such an iconic part of the 90’s and early 2000’s, that I couldn’t help but love this little dude. I get nostalgic thinking about Sonic X, a bunch of flash fan games, and even playing Green Hill Zone in the dentist’s office. Sonic will always be in the upper echelon of iconic fictional characters.

So when I got Sonic Adventure 2 in 8th grade and was excited to play exhilarating 3d Sonic action – I immediately was thrown for a loop when the Knuckles stage involved treasure hunting… Don’t get me wrong, City Escape was a blast, and I played a handful of other Sonic stages on VS mode, but that Knuckles stage changed my perspective of Sonic forever…

I became baffled at the idea of ‘Sonic being good’. This became even more true when I learned that everybody’s favorite Sonic game was Sonic Adventure 2. How? I still don’t get it to this day. But I wanted to understand this blue hedgehog a bit more. So in 2017, I popped in the Sonic Mega Collection in my GameCube to finally play the very first Sonic game…

AND I COULDN’T GET PAST MARBLE ZONE!

Attempt after attempt, for upwards of 4 hours, I tried to get past Marble Zone. I couldn’t. I was defeated.

Sonic is supposed to be a game about going fast, right? Green Hill Zone got that right. That was fun!

But Marble Zone… It was nothing but a bunch of slow, tedious platforming stages with hazards that you can barely react to and a system that gives you a game over if you lose too many lives. One man can only play the first 5 stages of a video game over and over again before he begins to lose his mind.

So I gave up. Years went by. My tolerance for Sonic continued to dwindle. My disdain for this franchise increased with each passing mention of his name. The Sonic movie came out and I avoided it like the plague. Sonic Forces came out and after getting it for free on PS+, I can certainly say that “it’s a game that I have played”. In my eyes, Sonic was nothing but a dead horse that Sega continued to beat into the ground…

I mean, what else was there even to say at this point?

I don’t know why. I don’t know how, but in 2022, I watched the Sonic movie.

It was okay.

But THEN, I watched Sonic 2 in theaters and for the first time since my childhood, I was once again enamored with this world.

So I gave Sonic Adventure 2 another shot. I beat it! It’s still not good, but the Sonic levels are pretty fun.

Then I checked out Sonic Adventure 1. I played the Sonic levels. They’re fun! I didn’t want to play the rest of the game though.

And then Sonic Frontiers released and for the first time EVER, I finally understand Sonic. He’s a blue hedgehog that goes really fast and going really fast is pretty dang cool.

Sonic is at its best all about spectacle. Fun atmospheres with killer music where a tiny animal takes down aliens, machines, and monsters. Sonic has the cool factor pouring through his veins.

Sonic Frontiers is not a perfect game. Far from it. But I loved my time with it. I had a lot of fun. I even 100%ed the game!

So now, I’m left with a new found curiosity: is it too late for me to love the Sonic franchise?

It’s no shock to call this series polarizing. It has many ups and downs. But I want to know if its highs outweigh its lows…

So I checked out the Sonic Origins collection. This collection includes updated versions of Sonic 1, 2, 3, and CD, with its greatest inclusion being the removal of game overs. For the first time ever, if you die in Marble Zone Act 3, you no longer have to play through the same 5 stages over and over again. This might very well be the biggest miracle in gaming history.

With this new found tech, and my new interest in Sonic, I finally sat down and beat the entirety of Sonic 1. I am not joking when I say that I am genuinely ecstatic to say that “I have beaten Sonic 1”. It’s my gaming white whale. As a retro video game fan, this is a rite of passage that I have finally overcome. For that, I am grateful…

So how is Sonic the Hedgehog?

This game kinda SUCKS. Look, I’m sorry to make you read an entire college essay about my history with Sonic, only for the actual review to be almost entirely negative, but damn is this game frustrating.

The positives are fairly straightforward. This game looks good. The art direction is fantastic, the character designs are endearing. The music slaps. The presentation of Sonic 1 (and all of the 2D Sonic games) is a masterclass in 16-bit era graphics.

Meanwhile, the level design in Sonic 1 is a masterclass in how NOT to design a level.

Green Hill Zone is great. This game STARTS great. Winding hills, loop de loops, multiple paths, fun power ups. As far as first stages go, this one’s a banger.

It all goes downhill after that.

Marble Zone still sucks. That slow, tedious platforming filled with boring ‘move the block’ puzzles. At times, when you fall, you end up on the bottom of the stage again, requiring you to do all of that annoying platforming over again. It’s not fun.

Spring Yard Zone tries to get back into the fast action gameplay, but it’s not nearly as fun as Green Hill. In fact, you’re better off not going super fast through these stages. Enemies will constantly come out of nowhere, causing you to take unnecessary hits and lose all momentum. I didn’t hate Spring Yard, but I can’t say that I enjoyed it.

That doesn’t matter though, cause nothing is worse than the dreaded Labyrinth Zone.

I spent upwards of 30 minutes playing just the final section of Labyrinth Zone. Here was an escape sequence, full of tight platforms, all with spikes, while water constantly rises. Oh and you have to do all of this without getting hit.

There is nothing fun about Labyrinth Zone. The water slows you down to 2MPH, the air bubbles are insanely inconsistent, there are even MORE enemies that seemingly come out of nowhere. If you get this far in the game and still think “Sonic the Hedgehog is a game about going fast”, I no longer understand you.

The last 3 zones are mostly more of the same, though nothing gets as bad as Labyrinth Zone. I like Star Light Zone. Scrap ‘Blow my Brains out’ Zone has a couple of infuriating segments. And the Final boss fight is mostly annoying because I didn’t have any rings.

Most of the boss fights are extremely easy. Robotnik comes flying in on his space ship, you avoid a couple of obstacles, and hit him at the appropriate times. Other than the final fight, I had zero trouble with these.

I could talk about the Special stages, but I only got the first one and it’s pretty dumb. The entire screen moves around so much that it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on, let alone try to get one of the chaos emeralds. As far as Sonic Origins goes, it’s best to just avoid these.

I can’t recommend Sonic the Hedgehog. My friend Aden said it best “it’s a great proof of concept”. For a franchise with so many ups and downs, it’s kind of insane that it also has a rough start. Even so, my curiosity in this series is still fairly strong right now.