As of writing this, Sonic the Hedgehog and his colorful group of friends have taken up temporary residence at the illustrious International House of Pancakes. Sonic’s position as ambassador of mid-at-best flapjacks and adjacent breakfast items is, unintentionally, kind of the ultimate signifier that the blue hedgehog has reached peak saturation as a franchise, mascot, character and video game series.
“But Sean,” you might say, “it’s just pancakes! Lighten up!” I say this goes beyond pancakes and straight into the soul of a beloved but wayward video game icon.
Although, I did enjoy the pancakes…
Regardless, my point is that Sonic partnering with IHOP is just a recent example in a long line of Sonic saturation; some good, some bad. The movies are good for what they are, Sonic Prime did well on Netflix, there’s plenty of new merchandise that was never around when I was a kid (like an increasing lineup of fun LEGO sets) and the IDW comic series continues to be one of the best (if not the best current) example of Sonic storytelling.
However, these better examples stand alongside countless products with old renders of Sonic’s visage slapped on, Sonic Speed Cafes popping up across the nation — I am once again a hypocrite, driving up to San Diego to visit the first location, because I am a freak — and a slew of brand-tie-ins, mobile game crossovers, and other corporate and stale promotions.
But that’s what saturation is, a mixed bag of varying quality because Sonic is just everywhere now. You’d think I’d be happy about this as one of the character’s most passionate fans, but I’m more mixed than anything. I’m mostly uneasy because this saturation is the result of the current direction of the Sonic franchise that has left the games feeling rudderless. To put it simply, somewhere along the line, SEGA and Sonic Team decided Sonic could be anything, which has turned him into a big nothingchilidog.
Sometimes this limitless versatility is good! It can work for things like comic book superheroes — there’s a Spider-Man for everyone in Spider-verse — and I think this works under the notion of Sonic being a multimedia franchise, the aforementioned comics and movies being good examples. But where we run into a problem is the games — uncommitted to any one notion of Sonic and always choosing a new direction with each major game.
This isn’t bad in a vacuum, but because Sonic Team has been throwing spaghetti at the wall for close to 20 years at this point, experimentation is now the well-worn norm. We’re seeing half-baked ideas and erratic execution quality in games committed to neither a new direction nor solid implementation of classic Sonic elements. It’s time to pick a noodle off the wall and stick with it. To it?
Sonic games of the last two decades have all had some “bold and new” element shoehorned into 3D Sonic gameplay — which has itself never fully been polished enough to form a solid base to support these new ideas. Sonic is amorphous, no longer bold for experimenting, now just a nebulous concept that is in desperate need of decisive direction lest it become the wrong kind of blur. Sonic is becoming the modern Mickey Mouse: lacking identity and trying to be anything and everything while still being nothing at all.
Sonic doesn’t need to keep trying new ideas or rehash old ones banking on pure nostalgia, it needs to choose a direction and see it through to its best possible self.
So how did SEGA and Sonic Team get here? I would argue the issues began with the release of Sonic the Hedgehog (2006). In KingK’s video “The Unfortunate Legacy of Sonic the Hedgehog,” he talks about how Sonic 06 was, in many ways, the next step in the Sonic Adventure evolutionary line. The game is built around multi-character gameplay with interweaving stories, polished gameplay that was clearly an evolution of what Adventure brought to the table, and a story on the scale of your average action Hollywood blockbuster.
Sonic 06 wasn’t conceptually flawed as it had intentions of evolving the current Sonic gameplay of the time into a more polished form. In a better timeline, a more complete version of 06 would have given way to another game with similar mechanics where 3D Sonic gameplay was further polished, perhaps even perfected. Even if the Sonic Adventure style of games wasn’t perfect when it was first conceived, it was successful, popular, and had a strong enough base that SEGA and Sonic Team could have, I imagine, toughed out the lean times in order to get to a more perfected product. I’m reminded of Super Mario 64 giving way to all its successors until we get the polish of the format in games like Super Mario Odyssey. There was a blueprint for what 3D Sonic could be.
But alas, Sonic 06 was rushed and put on shelves as an incomplete mess, and the world subsequently clowned on it, turning it into the go-to joke of the fandom as a whole. It was, as KingK puts it in his video, “an icon of absolute ruin.”
So, as big companies tend to do in response to failure, they decided to throw the Sonic Adventure baby out with the bathwater. It wasn’t rushed execution, it was the entirety of the project. This is speculation — I don’t know the whole story, of course, but it’s very easy to draw a line from Sonic 06 bombing to Sega completely changing the Sonic formula going forward. The board was cleared and the slate was cleaned; it was time to try a new Sonic.
There was potential in this for sure. The first thing that Sega put out with the intention of a new direction was Sonic Unleashed, a game lauded for its daytime levels for pushing 3D Sonic gameplay to new speeds with effective experimentation. Then the game also had Sonic turning into a werehog at night, which gave each level in the game a nighttime beat-em-up variant, a role that could have been better suited for Knuckles (in a game about parts of the planet floating into the sky, you know, like Knuckle’s home?? Don’t get me started), but SEGA was likely too afraid to significantly use Sonic’s extended cast beyond Tails out of fear that the large cast was part of why Sonic 06 and its story bombed. Additionally, as good as the day levels are in Unleashed, the game was, like most Sonic games before and after it, rushed to make a release date, leaving it feeling very unfinished.
This lead to Unleashed getting mixed-at-best reviews. So the game was deemed another failure and SEGA had the same response as they did to 06 — clear the board and try something new. This trend continued with every new Sonic game; try something new, veer from that potential and crunch for a hard release date, leave the game unfinished and the new idea left in a terrible state. Furthermore, when a game is half-done, the other half has to be filled with something, and it’s typically some combination of shoddy 3D gameplay cobbled together scraps of the previous game and a healthy dose of forced nostalgia.
Shoehorned nostalgia is a huge problem in Sonic games, and it unfortunately starts in Sonic Unleashed. The 2008 game first introduced the concept of side-scrolling segments of 3D sonic levels. Despite very little else being implemented from Unleashed into future games — really just the boost mechanic, but not the quality it had in Unleashed, nor the momentum techniques/quicktime dodges that made it work — the side-scrolling bits were one of the few things that still persists in the games. But these later implementations were subpar at best; clunky segments utilizing a different interpretation of speed (speed rewarded for pattern memorization) in the middle of that enticing Sonic Adventure interpretation of speed (hitting the right boosters and chaining attacks to keep momentum) and the transition just never worked smoothly.
It’s really baffling that this is what SEGA and Sonic Team thought was the most salvageable part of Sonic Unleashed when there’s a lot the fanbase actually did like about this new direction. What’s worse is the nostalgia path drove the team into injecting 2D Sonic stuff into 3D Sonic stuff in ways that felt incongruous almost every time! There was a sense, at one point, that the fans wanted a return to “the old days,” but this was clearly misinterpreted by the Sonic teams at large.
It’s an issue that plagued Sonic Colors, a vaguely fun game that’s lost in trying to figure out what 3D Sonic even is anymore; stripped of world-threatening Adventure-like stakes, drained of Unleashed speed experimentation, and desperately cribbing from previous 2D games.
Then comes Sonic Generations, a game that’s fun in concept and hollow in execution: modern Sonic is reunited with his classic self to take on levels of Sonic past in both 2D and 3D style. Granted, the 3D sections also have 2D side-scrolling because that’s what Sonic is now. This problem is repeated in Sonic Forces, a game with its own identity crisis and lack of commitment to any new idea with potential. You can’t skip Sonic Lost World and Sonic Boom, the former being a Mario game in structure and the latter being a reboot that somehow ended up more disastrous than the last time they tried a reboot. Sonic Frontiers, a more freeform open world experiment, had potential, but is again a “bold new direction” that felt rushed into its drab, empty Breath of the Wild-inspired trappings. Sonic Dream Team has nice character models and colors. That’s all I got.
SEGA is aimless with Sonic. When something doesn’t work they drastically change direction, don’t fully believe in it, and then fumble that new direction. The result is a smoothing out of Sonic gameplay since they can’t commit to anything long enough to sharpen it. It’s everything and nothing at the same time. Sonic needs direction — any direction at this point.
My vote goes to committing to the Unleashed day level style. The way those daytime levels feel fast without losing control are powerful and the methods behind it should have never been abandoned. Also, not to sound like every other extremely online Sonic fan, but for what it’s worth, SEGA could benefit from at least looking into popular Sonic fan games for insight. I’m not saying replace Sonic Team with fan teams, but just perusing what Sonic fans see has potential is worth the time and effort. Of course, we’d risk the team not being to stick with one of those directions, but that’s another can of worms.
Really, any consistent direction is something at this point. It feels like there’s this nebulous collection of 3D Sonic game elements that get rotated and mixed-and-matched with each new game with almost no rhyme or reason. It’s just a repetitive process of misidentifying what worked, mixing elements left behind long ago, and expecting drastically different results. It’s exhausting. But hey, Sonic Frontiers was okay and there’s rumors of a sequel; it’s not my favorite place to start from as a path forward, but at least it is a forward step instead of a step sideways, an iteration with room to re-tool instead of re-think completely.
Remember how I said that it’s good that Sonic can be anything, specifically in regards to the larger multimedia franchise? I think that’s the key here to actually getting to a good place with the “main” line of 3D games. Sonic has been thriving as a movie star, a TV show, a comic book and as a LEGO minifig (amongst other toys). Heck, even the 2D “classic” style games have had solid reception, which certainly helps prove my point that consistent vision leads to positive results.
Sonic‘s multimedia success has certainly bought the franchise time to get its AAA game product line right. If nothing was working, I think there would be a breakneck rush to figure this out. That said, a commitment needs to be made because as everything else Sonic-related begins to thrive, we’re left with mainline games that aren’t much fun to play and it feels more noticeable! Even if the next iteration isn’t perfect, SEGA needs to tough it out and find that perfection over time by establishing and sticking to a vision.
