I’m a fanboy of two game series – The Legend of Zelda and Sonic the Hedgehog. My fandom for Zelda is evident in the multiple fansites I run about the game series, but my Sonic fanboyism is not as evident. In reality, I’m deep down a Sonic boy; I grew up with Sonic, not Zelda, and so the blue blur has a little place in my heart that Link will never occupy. And that’s why I’m so upset about the state of the Sonic series. Sega is truly lost.

Let’s start by looking at Sega’s current focus for Sonic: speed. Speed is the focus, because Sonic runs fast. Sonic always runs fast – nowadays, too fast for your eyes to keep up. There is nothing wrong with pairing Sonic and speed. It’s always been done, and it should be done. But there’s a problem when you have too much of a good thing – the most recent 2.5D Sonic games, Sonic Rush and Sonic Rush Adventure, focus so much on speed that the player can hardly keep up with Sonic as he blazes (no pun intended) across the screens of the DS. But it’s too early for criticism, I’ve hardly explained the rest of the Sonic series.

The three-dimensional Sonics are in a purgatory of sorts; they don’t really seem to know what they are. Sega was onto something with Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2, and I think if they’d gotten the camera just right then the games would have been spot-on. I, personally, thought both were great fun, especially Sonic Adventure, which kept a good amount of the spirit and drive from Sonic 3D Blast for Genesis (a good deal of the music in SA1 was rehashed from 3D Blast). In addition, there was something nice about seeing Sonic jump up into an actual spherical BALL that made the action more pleasurable – they’ve since renounced the ball jump in favor of a more realistic less-flippy jump.

To take you through the years of that jumping mechanic, from the very first Sonic up until Sonic Adventure our hedgehog would always form a neat, spherical ball. Sonic Adventure 2 changed this mechanic by using the same model for Sonic’s jump as for the normal, stationary Sonic – so the current model was made to literally jump straight up in the air, and then tuck to flip a few times before gracefully landing. As unrealistic as it was, it would have also left Sonic open to attack – something spinning that slowly wouldn’t damage a think on impact. If anything, I always thought it was the sheer speed of Sonic’s rotation that dismantled Robotnik’s robots, not the foce of the jump itself, which is why Sonic is able to destroy baddies by spin driving into them or rolling into them as well. In Sonic and the Secret Rings (Wii), the flipping jump has been completely abolished – Sonic jumps like a normal human being. He even has to charge his jump.

There are some intrinsic differences between the newer 2.5D and the 3D Sonics, differences that have remained contingent throughout both developments. The 2D Sonics, as I said earlier, focus entirely on speed – there is no other purpose to the game than to run incredibly fast. In the 3D Sonics, we see a difference: Sonic does not run very fast, and if he does it is never too fast that he can’t be followed. This was refreshing in Secret Rings, which I considered the first in a long chain of “hybrid” Sonic games that began Sega’s attempts to merge the 2.5D and 3D Sonic series. And yet, both are lacking something remarkable that keep them from being successful – and it appears to have flown over Sega’s collective heads time and time again.

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