Sonic's Good Again: The Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of My Relationship With the Sonic the Hedgehog Series

-The Beginning-

You know this story. I've told it before. But here it is, one more time, to set the scene.

It was 1993, and little three-year-old Goops was beginning to form an attachment to video games. I played my mom's Atari 2600 as often as possible, usually playing Space Invaders. One day, the system went dead and refused to turn on again. I was beside myself with grief, and my mom knew what she had to do: get another video game console. She understood the Atari 2600 was old news by the 90s, but since she hadn't kept up with gaming since getting it, she wasn't sure what would be a good system to buy. Originally she considered an NES, but when she asked my older cousin for advice, he directed her away - the NES was old hat, too. The SNES, then? Nah. There was something much cooler on the market. If she wanted the most awesome video game system 1993 had to offer, she needed a Sega Genesis. And so, one morning I woke up to the sight of a new-in-box Model 2 Genesis in the living room and I was enraptured. Later that morning, the system was hooked up and I turned it on for the first time...

My mom has since added some additional information and a correction to this classic tale of how I first got into video games. Firstly, it wasn't a birthday gift like I had misremembered - the Atari did not happen to break down around then, she just wanted to cheer me up with a modern video game console after seeing how upset I was that the Atari had bitten the dust. Hilariously, she also added that when she became a mother, she had actually planned to raise a child without video games, which were at the height of their stereotypical "bad influence/brainrot" stereotyping in the early 90s, and she had bought into that mindset. When I'd found the Atari hanging around the house, though, she'd been willing to let me try it, and when she saw how despondent I was upon its' death, she already knew it was too late and couldn't bear seeing me so sad. Since then, my younger brother and even Mom herself have grown into avid gamers, and we've held the medium in high regard in this household ever since.

But it all comes back to that Genesis, and the pack-in game. Sonic the Hedgehog 2.

Sonic 2 was my first non-Atari video game, and what an upgrade it was. Far from the basic graphics of the 2600, the Genesis was capable of rendering beautiful sprite art that could immerse the player into strange worlds. A lot of my childhood Genesis games filled me with a sense of wonder as I navigated the levels and imagined what else lay in this world beyond the borders of the screen. Perhaps the game that was most memorable in this regard was... Socket, actually, a 2D platformer clearly made to catch the audience of Sonic games that was one of the first games I added to my Genesis collection, but the actual Sonic games were definitely big influences too.

There were three things in particular that fueled my imagination. First was the music. It seems like retro gamers fall into two camps, people who love the Genesis' music and those who despise it and find it greatly inferior compared to SNES soundtracks. I'm sure it's at least partly because of how I grew up with it, but I'm firmly in the former camp. A lot of my favorite video game music is from the Genesis, and I prefer the harsher, more electronic sounds it offers compared to the SNES' softer, more "realistic" instruments. I whiled away hours in video game sound tests in an era before Youtube, just sitting in the options menu listening to my favorite tracks. Sometimes I'd make up scenarios in my head that used the music as inspiration for the action. Other times I'd just listen, using my video game system like a music player.

The second thing that helped to immerse me in these old games were obscure areas and hidden passages. I absolutely adore it whenever a game has an obscure little nook or cranny tucked away from sight for you to stumble onto. If you've ever wondered how the silly Pokemania rumors of the late 90s could ever find traction, this is why - there were plenty of games (including Pokemon Red and Blue themselves) that legitimately had bizarre hidden secrets or super-hard-to-find secret areas. This was before we could just go on the Internet and see videos and wikis that exhaustively took apart these games to find full maps of every level or explanations of every last crumb of code. We truly didn't know what else was hiding under the surface, didn't know what else could be hiding within that plastic cartridge, didn't know just how deep the world inside was.

The third imagination fueler was background art. If you craft a good background or scenery for your game and give me a good chance to have a look at it, I will be enthralled. Even to this day, I'll occasionally stop what I'm doing while playing something like Kirby or Pokemon or Octopath Traveler and just take in my surroundings and go 'wow, this is pretty' or 'that is so neat' and I'll just admire where I am for a bit before moving on with my adventure. Some of my favorite background art of all time comes from the Sonic series. From the craggy stylized mountains in Hill Top to the bustling mysterious metropolis of Chemical Plant, Sonic 2 set a tremendous impression with its' backgrounds, whisking me away to a world I almost couldn't believe had actually been created and made into a playable game. My imagination soared, wondering what it was like there. Who lived in the city Casino Night takes place in? What sort of places would you find yourself in if you went off into the background of Mystic Cave? What was the rest of the Death Egg like? These were things I gave great amounts of thought toward.

Of course, helping things was how fun Sonic 2 was to actually play. That's kind of important. I was enraptured by Sonic 2's world and I returned to it again and again throughout the 90s. It took me a few years to beat Robotnik and clear the main story and many runs ended with a Game Over in Oil Ocean, Metropolis, Wing Fortress, or Death Egg, but I rarely bothered with trying to get the Chaos Emeralds. I disliked how the Special Stages interrupted the action, and really didn't enjoy how they took away all my rings after an attempt. Ah, rings... I was absolutely obsessed with them. I always picked my way through Sonic levels slowly, getting every ring I could and refusing to let any in sight remain out of Sonic's grubby hands. In Emerald Hill Zone in particular, I would go on both the upper and lower paths and grab all the rings, taking an exorbitant amount of time to reach the goal for a level that was meant to be completed in less than a minute if you weren't Chaos Emerald hunting. This didn't apply to later levels quite as strongly - I avoided going underwater in Aquatic Ruin, for instance, and I tended to take the same route every time when playing as it just felt natural to do what had been done before. This ended up paying off big time much later.

Also, I almost always played as Tails by himself. I had two reasons: First, Tails' shorter height meant he could avoid getting crushed in certain situations, particularly Chemical Plant Zone with the sliding yellow box things. Secondly, Tails was the cuter of the two characters and I have always held cuteness in high regard, so he was my pick.

For Christmas of 1994 I received two more Sonic games: Sonic & Knuckles (I tended to get lost in Sandopolis Act 2, but did eventually beat it) and Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine (which, thanks to the little starburst on the box that said 'Puzzle Game' combined with my own lack of knowledge, meant I thought this was the first-ever puzzle-genre video game). At the local video store, I rented Sonic 3 and Sonic Spinball. Later, as the Genesis was fading away in its' old age, I added Sonic 3D Blast to my collection and was blown away by the graphics even if 3D Blast was too difficult for me to finish. Looking at Sonic 3D Blast as well as other prerendered games like Toy Story and Vectorman, I remember thinking that the Genesis would just keep getting more advanced games, not understanding that software can only be improved in tech specs so much before the hardware must be upgraded. I also got to try Sonic Triple Trouble on my Game Gear, and while I couldn't finish that either, I liked it well enough. But times were changing, and with my family going through a divorce followed by my now-single mom struggling with poverty, getting the latest video game consoles was out of the question, and I continued on through the late 90s still getting new Genesis games a couple times a year and not realizing the system wasn't being developed for any more and I was just getting reissued games being sold cheaply - the only way my mom could afford to keep getting new games was to stick with the Genesis even as it moved to the bargain bins. By 1999, though, I ended up trading my blue goofy cartoon mammal for a yellow one as I was swept away in one of - no, not one of, the biggest cultural event I've ever been a part of.

That'd be Pokemania, yep.

My new Pokemon obsession meant changing teams from Sega to Nintendo was the way to go. I never even considered asking for a Saturn or a Dreamcast (I'd seen the Saturn mentioned in magazine advertisements for Sonic 3D Blast, but I don't think I'd ever heard of the Dreamcast before 2000), and instead my next new console was a Game Boy Color. We later got a Nintendo 64 as the system entered its' twilight and was sold cheaply enough to be in reach, confirming my new allegiance. I was a full-on Nintendo convert thanks to Pokemon, and now Nintendo was my home company. I missed Sonic, but I hadn't seen much of him lately. What was Sega up to? I didn't really know - I still didn't have Internet access, and wasn't privy to industry news. Pokemon showed me the way, though - I picked up a magazine off the rack in a store one day and got my mom to buy it because it had a huge cover story about the next Pokemon games, Gold and Silver, and I was eager to learn more about the mysterious new games that had been teased in the anime and the first Pokemon movie. I read the rest of the issue as well, and in a section devoted to rumors, I saw a piece of scuttlebutt that caught my eye: Apparently, Sega was in deep financial trouble. Huh.

A year later, I got another issue of the same magazine (Electronic Gaming Monthly), this time because its' cover story was a huge piece on the brand new Game Boy Advance. Every GBA launch title was reviewed, and upcoming ones were previewed. And there I saw it: coming soon for the GBA, Sonic Advance. Sonic on a Nintendo system?! Elsewhere in the magazine, it had been explained - Sega was giving up on the hardware business and would become a third-party developer, and they were going to team up with Nintendo to release Sonic games on the GBA and Gamecube (though they eventually did put Sonic games on other consoles starting with Sonic Heroes, for the first few years only Nintendo would get Sonic games). I wouldn't lose my old friend after all! My shift in company alignment had paid off handsomely, and now I could play Mario, Sonic, and Pokemon games all on the same system!

What could possibly go wrong?

-The Adventure Era and Sonic Mega Collection-

Actually, nothing. Nothing was wrong, at least not at first. My first 3D Sonic game was Sonic Adventure 2 Battle on the Gamecube. It was certainly different from the old games, but I still loved it. I sank countless hours into it, getting most (not quite all) of the Emblems and playing through the main story as well as spending a ton of time in the Chao Garden, raising those virtual marshmallows. Sonic Adventure DX was next, and while it was a little clunkier than 2 Battle, I figured that was to be expected since it was a rerelease of an older game. DX also came with the Sonic Game Gear games, which I spent some time trying to beat. I didn't finish any of them, though I did reach the final boss of Sonic 1 8-Bit once before getting a Game Over. Around the time of 2 Battle, I also picked up Sonic Mega Collection. Having all the old Genesis Sonic games on one disc was incredible, and I played the absolute hell out of this thing, making a lot of use of the Debug Mode cheat to mess around and make my own obstacle courses for Sonic to deal with.

This was also around when I started spending more time on the Internet, and of course I looked up my old Sonic games to learn more about them. I was deeply intrigued by the discovery that Sonic 2 had a bunch of levels cut from the final game, especially the infamous Hidden Palace Zone. Though HPZ did appear in Sonic & Knuckles, it was very short and barely counted as a level. Sonic 2 was going to have a full, proper Hidden Palace, and I loved the graphics that had been dug up for it. I dearly wished Sonic 2 had gotten Hidden Palace included in it somewhere, not to mention all the other unused stages like Wood Zone. This also gave me closure concerning that mysterious track in the Sound Test that didn't play anywhere in-game. As a kid, I figured it would play if I collected all the Emeralds, but I wasn't good enough at the Special Stage to get them all and so I gave up trying before long.

On the handheld front, while Sonic Advance 1 had eluded me, I did eventually pick up Sonic Advance 2. It wasn't terrible, but it didn't feel like the Genesis games to me. Sometimes it seemed like all you did was hold right and jump occasionally instead of the intricate, secret-filled stages of the old games, the later stages spammed bottomless pits (a sign of things to come), and the tiny screen made it difficult to see danger in time to avoid it. I did get through it (albeit without all the Chaos Emeralds, as usual) and actually spent quite a bit of time in the time trials replaying the levels I liked most, but this Sonic game was one of a slowly growing bunch that were leaving me feeling whelmed.

I had been a Sonic fan for over ten years. While I didn't adore every game, I still liked the series a lot, and had a lot of faith in it. As games continued to release and I got more plugged in to the Internet and gaming culture at large, however, a shift in my view of the series that had already started to form would accelerate.

-The Sonic Cycle: Deciding to Walk Away-

Sonic Heroes was the turning point.

My copy of Mario Kart: Double Dash came with a bonus demo disc, and Sonic Heroes was included on that disc. I liked the demo, and it convinced me to give Heroes a try. At this point, though, I was a subscriber to Electronic Gaming Monthly and considered their reviews to be very knowledgeable, and to my disappointment they gave middling scores to Sonic Heroes. Still, I decided to buy it anyway, confident in a mainline Sonic title to once again thrill me with hours upon hours of gameplay. Besides, they had also given glowing reviews to Sonic Advance 2 and declared it to be just like the Genesis games, which I should have realized earlier meant that I shouldn't have taken their word as the gospel.

Heroes was the first mainline Sonic game I failed to finish. While I did reach the end of the Team Rose campaign, Team Sonic wasn't so lucky. I found myself irritated by bottomless pits and stymied by failure, unable to clear the Lost Jungle stage as Team Sonic due to a difficult chase sequence that Team Rose got to skip. I eventually gave up on Heroes and never beat it, writing it off as kind of a dud.

Then it got worse. Shadow the Hedgehog was the series' next big game the following year. Burned by Heroes, this time I merely rented Shadow, but once again I was unable to complete it as I ran into confusing and annoying levels full of bottomless pits I couldn't stop falling into. Shadow got even worse reviews than Heroes, further damaging the series' reputation and leaving me concerned. Was Sonic not good any more? Why wasn't I having fun with these new games? Why were they so hard and full of death pits?

There was a bright spot in this time, however. In between Heroes and Shadow, Sonic Gems Collection released, and while I had little interest in most of its' offerings, I was delighted to get the chance to finally play Sonic CD, the last 16-bit Sonic platformer I had never gotten to try. It was... good, but weird. The ring layouts were odd, with rings being positioned in odd clusters and sometimes being inaccessible inside walls (I now realize this is probably because those rings are meant to be collected in the Past or Future and that all four variations of a level must share the same ring positioning). Instead of freeing Flickies from Badniks, they were powered by flower seeds. The level design felt a little off and I didn't understand the time travel mechanic. And Sonic was by his lonesome again - I missed Tails and Knuckles. It was nice to get some more Sonic levels to run through, but Sonic CD, like Sonic 1, just didn't stack up against 2 and 3K for me.

The future of the Sonic franchise seemed shaky. The fun of the Adventures was feeling far away, and the platforming perfection of 2 and 3K was further yet. And then along came the meme that would force my hand.

You may be familiar with the above image. This picture came into memetic prominence in the late 2000s, as Sonic hit a slump that seemed unending. The presence of a picture of Sonic and the Black Knight dates this image to around 2009, but I swear I saw people talking about the Sonic Cycle years earlier than that. Seeing this meme made my cheeks burn with embarrassment, because I had seemingly fallen into the exact trap it was talking about. I was the stupid idiot fan in the last bullet point who kept falling for it. Over and over I kept buying new Sonic games, hoping to rekindle the magic. If it couldn't match the joy of the Genesis titles, could it at least grab me like the Adventures did? But three times now (counting Advance 2) I had tried a new Sonic game only to be disappointed. With the Internet going at full blast, I could see what other people thought about Sonic now, and the message was loud and clear: I wasn't alone in thinking these new games were lacking. People did not like them very much, especially Shadow the Hedgehog, which was endlessly mocked for its' "edginess". Even now, Shadow is the poster boy for "trying too hard to be cool". Ow The Edge.

I saw all these people being dismissive of the series. I saw endless complaining, moaning, and griping about how Sonic games sucked now. I saw people saying only the Genesis games were good and Sonic had sucked ever since. I had seen these comments pretty much ever since I started using the Internet, but before, I had dismissed them. People said that any time you weren't playing as Sonic or Shadow, the Adventure games sucked, and I disagreed. I liked all of the gameplay styles. I liked the Gamma and mech stages. I liked the much-maligned emerald hunting segments with Knuckles and Rouge. Hell, I liked going fishing with Big the Cat! So I waved aside their criticisms... at first. But after several disappointments in a row, their words rang true.

I felt like a fool. I hated that feeling. And so I did the only thing I could think of, to stick it to The Sonic Cycle and get away from a franchise that felt like it was falling apart and that had drifted too far away from those Genesis classics. In the second half of the 2000s, I began the process of walking away from the Sonic series. From afar, I saw the twin disasters that struck in 2006 - Sonic 06 (a rushed game full of bugs and terrible loading times that become reviled on the level of Superman 64, Action 52, and Big Rigs, hyped as one of the worst games ever made) and Sonic the Hedgehog Genesis (a terrible GBA port of the first game that was considered an absolute embarrassment). Having instantly been proven right, I felt vindicated, and it motivated me to continue staying away. Which I did. ...Mostly.

For about ten years, while I occasionally went back to my favorite Sonic games, I largely skipped any new releases. Early on there were a couple of games I gave a chance to - the first Sonic Advance and Sonic Rush. However, I didn't get very far in either game, especially Rush, again due to those damned bottomless pits, and at this point I was convinced that Sonic was toxic and he was incapable of being in a game worth a damn any more. Adventure 2 might as well have been the final Sonic game, as far as I was concerned. And so after those final brief experiments (and after viewing that Sonic Cycle image for the first time and realizing I was still giving this damn blue rodent more chances), I completely abandoned the series. Sonic Advance 3, Sonic Unleashed, Sonic Colors, Sonic and the Secret Rings, Sonic and the Black Knight, I ignored them all. Sonic 4? Sonic 4 was an insult. Wrong designs, wrong physics, all of it wrong. Then Sonic Generations came out and people said it was actually good. I didn't believe them, and even when my brother borrowed a copy and tried it out, I didn't dare play it. I had fallen for The Sonic Cycle too many times and I refused to let it happen again. I was out. Done.

There was only one thing that could possibly bring me back, I'd thought to myself. Some kind of new game that TRULY brought back the old classic style. Not like the Advance games. It needed to be like the Genesis games. It needed to look like them, feel like them, basically be another one of them. I wasn't even confident I'd be able to trust an "Adventure 3". It was old-school or bust. I was a Sonic Genwunner.

And then, in 2017, about ten years after giving up on Sonic... I actually got my wish.

-Checking In On Old Friends: Sonic Mania and The Murder of Sonic The Hedgehog-

Sonic Mania was magical.

I almost literally could not believe it. They had finally, finally found someone who understood what Sonic was supposed to be. I still didn't quite grasp what exactly that was, but it didn't matter. The magic was back, in a game made with passion and love from people who had been lifelong fans of the Genesis games, just like me. I ate Sonic Mania up, and my passion for the old games flared back up from dormancy as I went back and did fresh playthroughs of Sonic 2 and Sonic 3K not long after my first run through Mania. This was also well after ZFRP had started up, and so as we are wont to do I began putting Sonic stuff into RP.

I'm sure you remember some of it.

However, my love of the series remained qualified, with a big asterisk: I only liked Mania because it was a love letter to the original 16-bit sidescrollers, and I knew that it had been developed by a team of Sonic fans Sega was working alongside, not by Sonic Team themselves, who I no longer trusted. After Mania, I went right back to ignoring Sonic games, and I was again proven right by the masses when Sonic Forces, releasing around the same time as Mania, was critically panned. The game made by fans was good. The game made by Sega themselves was bad. Sonic as a series was still dead, and as long as Sega refused to keep the Mania team on board to make a Mania 2, and a Mania 3, and 4 and 5 and 6, I would continue passing Sonic games up. I remained a Sonic Genwunner, still convinced that the series couldn't recover. Sonic Boom's cartoon was good, but the games were considered awful, with Rise Of Lyric in particular being slammed as even worse than Sonic 06! Sonic Colors Ultimate was next and while I took a quick look at reactions to it, I left rolling my eyes as I saw reports come in that it was janky and buggy and worse than the original, which I'd already skipped. Sonic got a feature film and I didn't watch it, though I was relieved they changed the horrific initial design for the character because seriously, how did that pass inspection? Sonic Frontiers was next and I skipped that too... though, for the first time in a long time, I was vaguely intrigued by the open-world format. Knowing the Switch version would be inferior, though, I didn't make any effort to get a hold of it, and although my brother bought it for his PS5, I was never motivated enough to ask for a chance to play. My rebellious 'screw you, Modern Sonic, you took my money and gave me bottomless pits' boycott had faded into 'meh, who cares, it's probably bad anyway' ennui, softened by time, but I still didn't have any reason to give Sonic another chance. He'd burned me so many times, why should I extend a hand again?

I made another exception for The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog in 2023. It was a free game about two hours long, and a wildly different genre from the usual Sonic content, so I figured I would give it a try. I actually loved it. It was a delightful little game, and the characters were written so well. It was like reconnecting with old pals, and I walked away happy that I tried it, but also low-key kind of wanting more Sonic. But there wasn't any more Sonic, at least not any good Sonic. Right? So I resigned myself to maybe playing a fangame sometime and let it go, moving on to other games and interests and once again leaving Sonic behind.

But then, in swooped Internet discourse once again. And this time, the overly-negative masses lost me.

-Sonic Origins: Unfinished Business, and Trying To Understand-

Over the years, thanks to advancing hardware and upgrading to flatscreen televisions, I had lost legal access to the classic Sonic games. I could play most of them on the Switch via a Genesis collection my brother had bought as one of our very first Switch games, but some of them had emulation issues and would lag button inputs, making Spinball kind of a pain and Sonic 2 nearly unplayable. Worse, the collection lacked Sonic 3, Sonic & Knuckles, and Sonic CD entirely. There had to be another way.

And there was! My interest was piqued when Sega released Sonic Origins, and it was piqued further when it got the Plus expansion that added the old Game Gear games and Amy as a playable character. I considered getting it just to have access to my old favorites again. For a while, though, I was hesitant. Once again the gamers were negative, slamming Origins for having bugs and glitches due to being rushed out the door. Even worse, they had changed some of Sonic 3's music due to legal issues over ownership, and the hardcore fans of the old games were up in arms, disgusted with the new music and making memes about how horrible and awful it was. I listened to the replacement tracks and was amused it was Genesis-y renditions of the "replacement" music that had been in the old Sonic and Knuckles PC port from the 90s. A cute reference, I thought. Yeah, they didn't sound quite as good, but... were they really THAT awful? Might you guys be exaggerating just a touch? (Sure enough, it turned out that these songs were actually the original songs meant to play in-game before new music was made by those folks who then went and mucked up rereleases with their copyright claims. The songs were redone for Origins for some reason and could have been better, but they are legit the original, "proper" melodies we were meant to hear all along before those collabs happened!)

But then I started seeing another opinion online, and this one was the one that finally went too far. Now people were saying that not only was Modern Sonic not good, not only was Sonic Adventure not good... but upon revisiting the original games in Origins, now it was being proclaimed that Sonic the Hedgehog was never good in the first place.

No.

Okay, like... Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and it's okay to dislike things that other people like. But if you love something, and other people yell at you that you shouldn't love it because it sucks or it's lame or it's for babies, that's not right. Their opinions are their opinions, not your opinions. You shouldn't hate something just because other people hate it too. You need reasons of your own to form a like or dislike. This was the point I realized I was getting all of my information on Sonic games from people who hated Sonic no matter what he did and I needed to stop. If I didn't want to try his games any more, that was fair, but I needed to get away from these toxic takes and stop letting them ruin my good memories of the games I loved.

Most of all, I realized I should have figured out what was happening because I'd already seen this sort of relentless negativity destroy another fandom of something I never stopped loving.

I used to engage with the Pokemon fandom semi-regularly. I was an active participant on Pokemon boards on GameFAQs back in the third and fourth generations, I played NetBattle in 2006 avidly for a while (my Sleep Talk Kingler was the stuff of legends), and I would swap Friend Codes with people there in the fourth and fifth gens to trade Pokemon. Eventually I stopped using GameFAQs, but I still lurked around Pokemon community hubs, and up to the 3DS era I would poke my head into Reddit's Pokemon boards to see what was up. But more and more, all I could ever see was negativity. "Pokemon sucks now." "Pokemon is the same every gen." "Pokemon is for idiot children." And, of course, "Pokemon was never good."

Undeniably, the 3D Pokemon games on more recent systems feel different from the sprite-based ones. Are the 3DS and Switch Pokemon games perfect? Hell no. I could rattle off annoyances and grievances all day. Some Pokemon are too common, some are too rare. Sometimes it's too hand-holdy. Sometimes the story sucks. Sometimes the characters are annoying. Sometimes annoying junk happens that you wish wasn't a thing. But I still love this series and these games, and the supposed "fandom's" toxicity grew worse with every gen. People lost their minds when Sword and Shield didn't include every Pokemon, and while I was upset too, I recognized that if they kept dumping in more species of Pokemon with every gen, eventually it would simply be too much. At this point there are over 1000 monsters to pocket, and while it would certainly be possible for the world's biggest franchise to make ubergames that could slot every last one of them into the world map somewhere, it had been obvious for a while that such a thing simply wasn't realistic. Game Freak doesn't have the time to make perfect games, the franchise machine is too much of a cash cow for that. But what they're making still feels special to me, warts and all, and while Scarlet and Violet drove many hardcores away with their issues like graphical errors and slowdown, I was won back after being a bit whelmed by Sword and Shield, and Area Zero and its' associated boss fight is one of my favorite final dungeons in any game, ever. Even now, writing this, not even listening to the music but just recalling echoes of it in my brain, I still get choked up and emotional thinking about Area Zero and the incredible emotional rollercoaster it put me on. Area Zero proved to me that Game Freak are not "lazy" or "soulless" like so many people seek to paint them as. Game Freak still cares about this franchise and they are trying their best to keep riding a beast that has somewhat gotten away from them, and I am here for it, even if I must now largely ignore Internet discourse as every new game is torn apart by people who will never be satisfied and yet keep buying and playing games they know they will hate.

As I thought about it, I realized the parallels to Sonic were obvious. Here too was a beloved series from my childhood, held up as an icon of 90s nostalgia for millennials the world over, that had become an Internet whipping boy. Worse, unlike Pokemon, I hadn't tried one of Sonic's games for over fifteen years aside from a couple of passionate fan projects that had been given the approval of Sega (they didn't make The Murder Of Sonic either, you see). I still wasn't ready to try a new Sonic game (Sonic Superstars had just released, and of course people were dogging it and saying it was awful), but at the very least, I wanted Origins, so I put it on my 2023 Christmas list. I wanted my old games back and I didn't want to pirate them, I'd rather support this collection and I was eager to try the new extra goodies Origins promised. That, and I had to go back to the beginning and see if the old games really were as good as I remembered.

They were.

Also, Sonic Origins is marvelous. Maybe it was buggy when it came out, I wouldn't know because I came in late, but post-release patches clearly smoothed things over and I didn't notice any weirdness besides the sorts of things that happened on the original hardware where on rare occasions you'd get a bit of a "wait, what just happened" and die without being quite sure what killed you. Numerous improvements were made, and I already told the story in my 2023-2024 gaming year in review about how I took advantage of the ability to retry Special Stages by paying Anniversary Coins, which were earned in place of extra lives, which in turn didn't need to exist any more because Origins gives you infinite lives. Of course, I also need to point out the glorious fact that the Sonic Origins version of Sonic 2 actually brings back the Sonic 2 version of Hidden Palace Zone as a secret one-act level to play. Finally getting Hidden Palace resurrected was magical to me, and I felt like a kid again as I explored it.

Being able to finally get all the Emeralds turned me into a Genesis Sonic completionist fiend, and I 100%-ed Sonic 1, Sonic 2, Sonic 3K, Sonic CD, Sonic Spinball, and Sonic 3D Blast all for the first time and within two weeks of one another at the end of 2023 and into the start of 2024. I unlocked everything in the Sonic Origins museum and saw all the 16-bit titles through to the end, and then with the entire Sonic Genesis catalog conquered I moved on to playing other old games on Nintendo Switch Online for a while, like Banjo-Kazooie.

And then, about half a year later, I booted up Sonic Origins again and played it even more. I finished the Story Mode and started digging into Mirror Mode, motivated by the Time Trial mode that kept track of if you'd played every level in both regular and mirrored versions. I played with different characters, I looked for alternate routes, I found secrets I didn't even know about, and I fell in love with these games all over again. And as I played them, I began wondering just what it was about these games that makes them so fun and replayable. Why do I go back to them again and again? What is so special about them? Is it really just nostalgia, or is there something special here?

It all came back to those magical immersive qualities I talked about way back at the start of this blog. Being sucked into Sonic's world. The graphics, the music, the sound, the secrets, and the incredibly satisfying momentum-based platforming. All of it came together into a dopamine feedback loop that made me fall into the zone, literally, when playing. I would forget about everything else and just lose myself in the video game, entranced. I'd be shaken out of it if I started getting killed, but as long as I was winning, the Sonic world's hold on me was tight.

I wanted more. But... but new Sonic games sucked, and they weren't classic-styled anyway, aside from Superstars which I'd heard was awful. And while I was trying to discard negativity, the exact criticism I heard the most about Superstars was that the bosses were brutally difficult, and my fear of being difficulty-gated was more than enough to keep me away, even if I would otherwise dismiss criticisms about Superstars if people had said other mean things about it.

But there was one thing I could try...

-Hesitantly Easing Back Into Sonic Games-

A fan remake of the Game Gear title, Sonic Triple Trouble, popped up on my Youtube recommended after I'd been watching other Sonic videos about the classics. Intrigued, I gave it a play and I was blown off my feet. Triple Trouble 16-Bit GETS IT. This is a true blue classic Sonic title, and it feels official. It is seriously impressive, expanding on the Game Gear original in ways that make it almost unrecognizable. This is the real deal. If you were looking for a new Sonic game that plays like and feels like the original games, this is it. I can't recommend it enough. Most fangames fail to make it past the demo stage before the developer gives up, but this one got done and I'm delighted that it did.

Playing Triple Trouble 16-Bit was great fun, but I was still kind of sad that official Sonic games couldn't match this quality. I still wanted some official Sonic games to sink my teeth into, and I even went back into Origins and played the original Triple Trouble as well as Sonic Chaos, finally clearing those games for the first time with the help of savestates. (They aren't great.) More and more though, I was getting curious about the main franchise again. It had been so long, and I'd skipped so many games... surely at least one of them had to be good, right? Wasn't there one in particular that was supposed to be good?

And, oh, right, it was getting remastered for current-gen hardware and releasing that same year.

The hype for Sonic X Shadow Generations was what really caught my attention. The marketing was excellent, with a cute little three-part series of anime shorts released to promote it that took me back to the Gamecube days. Shadow, Gerald, Maria, the Ark, Rouge, even Omega (one of my favorite parts of Heroes). I remembered people saying that Generations was the best post-Adventure Sonic game and wondered how true that statement was - or, rather, whether or not I would agree that it was good. And when it came out, people didn't slam it for glitches or declare that "Generations was never good". They liked it! They loved it, even! Supposedly Shadow Generations, the new game grafted onto Sonic Generations for the rerelease, was actually shockingly high quality. Could it be? Was Sonic finally pulling himself together?

I couldn't just rely on other peoples' opinions even if it was nice to see them be positive for a change. There was only one way to find out for sure - I had to play it myself. I put the Switch version of Sonic X Shadow Generations on my Christmas 2024 wishlist, just as I had Origins a year before. But while I waited, other Sonic games were tempting me to give them a try. And one of them was on sale for under twenty bucks, so... alright, I'd try it!

First up: Sonic Colors Ultimate. This one... wasn't the best start. I'd remembered people praising Colors in the past, but overall it was... meh. And I expected better than 'meh' from a series this famous and popular, even if it WAS the infamously divisive Sonic. I did beat it, at least, but I was a little concerned afterward. Was this what I had to look forward to? A pile of mediocre games? Fortunately, my next attempt at playing Modern Sonic went far better, as my brother set up his PS5 in the living room and encouraged me to give Sonic Frontiers a shot. He himself had finally beaten it - he hadn't gotten far the first time he'd played, and the second time hadn't been successful either, but after three attempts each a year apart, Frontiers finally hooked him and he played to the end.

Sonic Frontiers isn't perfect and I didn't expect it to be, but it was surprisingly fun and engaging, and I spent a lot of time with it. I especially liked just roaming around the open world collecting goodies and checking off spots on the map. I loved that kind of methodical checklist gameplay in other open-world titles like Maneater and it was good here too. But what I really thought was great about Frontiers was that it took its' stupid world of anthro animals running around ancient ruins and treated it with just the right amount of seriousness and gravitas. There was no fourth-wall "haha we're silly" immersion-breaking stuff here. Sonic and his friends and foes are treated as real characters with depth, and Frontiers actually explores the characters and examines them with open eyes, dissecting longstanding running gags like Knuckles forever guarding the Master Emerald, Amy chasing Sonic in hopes he becomes her boyfriend, and Tails struggling to be a hero when he still considers himself vastly inferior to his best friend. The Sage/Eggman dynamic is A DELIGHT and seeing more depth to him than the usual memes and hating that hedgehog was wonderful. And those boss fights? Woof. No wonder Draco yanked so much Sonic Frontiers boss music for RP. Can you blame him with bangers like that? I might have to use a theme or two myself next season... But I'm getting off track. Point is, Frontiers is really good and scratches the part of my brain that likes the open world formula of "go here, do this little thing, check the box, clean up the map, numbers go up".

Christmas arrived, and with it came Sonic X Shadow Generations, but first I decided to play the other Sonic game I'd asked for - I'd decided to, with hesitation, give Sonic Superstars a try in hopes that I could handle those nasty boss fights. And... I could! At least, on the normal mode. I didn't have enough courage to dive into the harder second story, but maybe later. Superstars was actually very fun, not quite as good as 2 and 3K but certainly worthy of being amongst the others like 1 and CD. Superstars uses Mania's engine, so it feels like the old games, and a lot of surprisingly creative ideas are used here. And then I fired up Sonic Generations...

One of the things I'd realized made me love the old Genesis games was the abundance of secrets and alternate paths. While I had neglected to make the most of these paths most of the time as a kid, as an adult I could more capably step off the well-trodden path and try out other ways through the stages. One of my Sonic Origins playthroughs was a run through Sonic 2 with Tails where I intentionally tried to take little-used routes as much as possible, combined with turning on Mirror Mode to flip everything horizontally. The result, to my surprise and delight, was a drastically different experience, uncovering a ton of depth into Sonic 2 and revealing that in all my playthroughs I still hadn't seen all it had to offer.

Now, Sonic Generations doesn't quite have that level of discovery... but they did it. They put the criss-crossing alternate routes into Generations. There are secret paths, special diversions, and hidden collectibles. It's not a straight shot to the end with the occasional stowaway goodie that plays the same every time, like in a Mario game. It's pure Sonic. It felt good to play, too, with minimal jank (at least a little jank is kind of inevitable in a game where you travel at high speeds) and great music backing the action. One of my least favorite parts of Frontiers was actually the Cyber Space levels. They were fine, I didn't hate them, but felt a little lacking. I did like the little shortcuts you could find, but the repeating stage themes and strict S Rank demands for some of them lowered my excitement. As it turns out, though, Generations' stages, while evocative of Cyber Space, were much better and more fleshed-out - which made sense, considering they were the main course now. While playing Sonic Generations, I realized, yes, those critics were right about at least one thing: Sonic Generations was good. Generations, Frontiers, Superstars - all good. All fun. All worth my time.

I beat Generations with Sonic's legions of friends yelling at me that that looked like a homing shot (if you know, you know). My eyes turned to the other game in the package, Shadow Generations. A brand new 2024 Sonic game.

Was it good?

-The Death of Cringe Culture: It's Okay To Like Things-

Much of the 2000s and 2010s was spent mocking things. One example would be Retsupurae, a Youtube channel that, full disclosure, I adored. This channel was run by SomethingAwful forum users who had pioneered the concept of a Let's Play, and after the idea exploded into popularity across the Internet and everyone with any possible means of recording their screen would do a Let's Play regardless of picture quality or game skill, they set out to mock people they had decided were 'doing it wrong'. The result was essentially Mystery Science Theater 3000 but for Let's Plays, with someone's video being played while the Retsupurae crew talked over it and tore it down. Retsupurae continued on for a while but eventually stopped producing MSTs. Instead they'd comment over other things like failed Kickstarter pitch videos, low-quality Flash animation, or a longplay of a bad game. There were reasons given for why the channel moved away from its' original focus, such as people making bad Let's Plays on purpose in hopes of being featured on the channel, and rabid Retsupurae fans bullying and issuing death threats toward people whose worst crime was making a lame Let's Play. But the change also feels like something that just kind of inevitably would happen, as with time going on, I've seen a shift in how people who mock bad things operate. It used to be that low quality media would be riffed on, but also "low quality people" as well. Who decided which people counted as low quality? Popular people. I loved many of the old Retsupurae videos, but I have to admit their deal was dangerously close to just bullying, singling out people who didn't meet their standards and shining a spotlight on them just to point and laugh.

Retsupurae was part of a bigger movement in the 2000s known as 'cringe culture'. SomethingAwful was famous for leading the charge on this kind of mockery in the early days of the Internet, so it was no surprise that SomethingAwful users carried the torch into the 2010s. Did someone enjoy something too enthusiastically? Were they too earnest about their affection? Did they do silly things like pretend to marry a fictional character or draw unprofessional fanart of the character in a strange crossover or a weird situation? Then they were CRINGE!!! And if you were cringe, you were a loser who deserved whatever you got from the Internet.

Sonic the Hedgehog might as well have been the mascot for "cringe". For many years, Sonic fans have had a poor reputation. Not just the ones I talked about earlier that complain about everything, but the ones that didn't complain. The ones who wallowed in Sonic as much as possible, who made him their identity, who created their own Noun The Animal characters that were often just recolors or edits of existing character art. Psssh, nothin personnel, kid.

Over time, however, more and more people have begun pushing back against those who mocked others for being harmless nerds. Was it weird or strange to wish you, too, were a cartoon animal helping to stop Dr. Eggman? So what if it was? Who cares? Why is it such a bad thing? If you google "cringe culture" now, you'll find oodles of results of people heaping scorn on the practice. It's bullying, it's ableist, it's dehumanizing, it's cruel, they say. Making fun of bad media, that's still perfectly fine and a beloved topic of Youtube essayists the world over. But making it personal? Involving the fans? Leave those people out of it!

Perhaps as a result of "cringe culture" making it so uncool to be a genuine fan of something, most mainstream media has become increasingly self-aware and snarky. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is commonly cited as the ultimate form of this cultural shift, and the stereotype of a "typical" Marvel film usually makes reference to the characters all being fourth-wall-breaking wisecrackers who mock their situations and make light of drama so that you are encouraged to not take anything seriously. It's just a movie, bro, don't get all invested in it, that's cringe. But with the cringe bullies on the wane, more and more it's beginning to feel like honest, earnest media akin to decades past is seeing a resurgence, and creators don't feel the need to constantly tear down their own universes so that they can wink at the audience.

Sonic the Hedgehog has undergone this exact shift in the 2020s, and I think it's part of why things have improved.

The Adventure games had legitimate plots and took themselves seriously. They were certainly silly in places, sometimes unintentionally ("Watch out, you're gonna crash! Ahh!"), but they had heart and were trying their damndest to entertain. There's no need for a story to be serious all the time, but if it's goofy all the time, it can be hard to care about characters who don't take anything seriously. Like in our RP, you know? It's not all doom and gloom, there's plenty of silly jokes and intentionally dumb events, but our characters care about things and don't just brush off danger all the time. Later Sonic games took on a silly, goofy quality, no longer putting much stock in what was happening. Sonic became dismissive of Dr. Eggman, just saying 'I always win, so give it up already, Baldy McNosehair', and the series seemed like one big joke that Sega themselves were in on. Sonic Colors is a good example - its' plot is very childish and silly, like a kids' cartoon from the early 2000s, and while I kind of liked how goofy it was, it certainly wasn't doing any of the rich character work I'd seen in the Adventures and would see more of in Frontiers, which did what I considered to be very good work in trying to clean up the mess of jokes and inconsistent writing these characters had become and getting them back on track with their Adventure characterizations. It was like it was done specifically for me - this was roughly where I had left off with these guys, and here they were trying to make it all fit together and pick up where we left off on the Gamecube so many years ago.

And so we come to Shadow Generations. This game is ridiculous. It's so over the top. It's straight out of the twenty-year-old Shadow game. Shadow's edginess and "damn, I'm cool"-ness is played to the absolute hilt. And it's all done completely unironically, with no hint of shame and no mockery. This is who Shadow is. This is the sort of character he's meant to be. And it is glorious.

It's a banger of a game so far, too. I'm only a few levels in, but the gameplay is fantastic! It's a refined and polished version of Sonic Generations, with levels rewarding skilled acrobatics but also including alternate safer paths to help a struggling player still reach the end (or recover from a mistake). Wrapped up alongside these gorgeous setpiece levels is a Frontiers-style overworld full of bonus challenges and collectible goodies. Combining the best parts of Generations and Frontiers into one game and showering it with tons of fanservice, callbacks, and continuity makes this game a true love letter to Shadow and his past, continuing his story and making me give a damn about the character once again. And they are completely shameless in embracing all of Sonic and Shadow's pasts in Generations, with even much-maligned games like Sonic 06 and Sonic Forces treated just as legitimately as everything else. Big props for that.

When I was opening my Christmas presents, I got a lot of Sonic-themed gifts. My mom had noticed I'd asked for multiple Sonic things and leaned into it, picking out additional surprise Sonic stuff like a Squishmallow, a Goo Jit Zu stretch toy, and a shirt. As I unwrapped yet another Sonic thing, she asked me: "Is Sonic popular again now or something?" I told her, nah, he's always been doing stuff, I'd only just now decided to try and get back into the series. And I'm glad I did.

---

RubyChao: man
RubyChao: i like things
Gooper Blooper: Things are nice
RubyChao: i recognize this is an incoherent statement but there's something fun about watching football and going "that was fun" and then coming home on the train and then playing video games and going "that was fun"
Gooper Blooper: It's nice to have fun, you know? To just... enjoy things.
Jumpropeman: i too like things
Jumpropeman: like we had our christmas party with the family on the 26th, and like, we didn't do anything crazy or special, but it was just like "that was nice. Nice time"
RubyChao: i think ultimately that's the purpose of life
to enjoy things and to be happy, and to share that with others

---

It's okay to like things. And, after two decades of mistrust, doubt, and shame, I can say without hesitation that Sonic the Hedgehog is good again.

Thanks for reading.