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.

I speak, of course, of the beautiful level design that was the cornerstone of the early Genesis games. Back then, the processor wouldn’t let Sonic go very fast without seriously disrupting the framerate of the game, so they cut it back and made intuitive and gorgeous level design instead. In cutscenes, particularly in Sonic CD, Sonic is a speed demon – he moves so fast that the viewer can hardly see him as he kicks up dust in his tracks. But the Genesis games never actually PLAYED that way. The Sonic in Sonic 1 was downright slow; the only thing to truly keep the player attentive was the level design. There were a million paths one could take to get Sonic to the finish line. Oftentimes there was a way to get Sonic to literally fly above the finish banner, because the player had found a path high up in the sky. I doubt the developers saw some of these paths when they made the game, which is what was beautiful about it.

So I am disheartened by Sonic Unleashed, the “successor” to Secret Rings, in that it is Sega’s second attempt to bring refuge to the Sonic series by merging its 2.5D and 3D series. The 3D games lacked speed but made up for it with somewhat interesting level design (especially Sonic Adventure, which I believe was their peak in 3D level design), and the 2D games lacked any level design at all but had so much speed that you wouldn’t have been able to stop and appreciate it anyway.

The biggest downfall of the 3D Sonic is his absolute inability to run over a loop on his own, something that showed from the very beginning in Sonic 3D Blast. Running over loops was one of the biggest joys of the early Sonic series, and it was most likely those loops that gave a greater sense of speed to the game – they were the speed-ups. Loops are now always automated, or don’t exist in the case of Secret Rings. But this has little relevance to what I was just talking about – for now.

Sonic Unleashed brings back the loop, but it looks to be automated again. And you might think that if Sega is really attempting to revive the series once and for all, they would focus on level design and eliminate the speed. When I first saw Sonic Unleashed, I was sure it was the Second Coming, because what I saw was remarkable. As more details of the game were revealed, that enthusiasm dropped, because I knew Sega was setting its blue hedgehog up for failure yet again. What a shame – they destroyed the beautiful 2.5D environments they had in favor of a more automated 2.5D-to-3D system. The game periodically switches between the two views, making for awkward Sonic Adventure-style battles that happen intermittently with Sonic Rush-style battles. But more importantly, they took the speed from the Sonic Rush games and finally applied it to the full 3D games.

Big mistake.

As I said, Sega’s focus on Sonic has been purely speed. This is terrible – as I also said, the older Sonic games featured a relatively slow Sonic. So, the beautiful new levels in Sonic Unleashed are destroyed by the player’s inability to view them. Sonic moves so fast that the entire game is automated – there is one path, Sonic is on auto-pilot, and you are there only to watch him whiz by. This was the situation in the Sonic Rush games, and it will most likely be the situation in Sonic Unleashed. In fact, I daresay they INCREASED the speed of Sonic in Sonic Unleashed, a move which will be detrimental to the series.

Sonic is not about speed. Sonic is about level design. Sonic is not about creating a new character every game – in Unleashed he’s a lycanthrope, what the heck? – Sonic is about running around an environment kicking some serious robot butt. Sonic is about a soundtrack that matches the environment. Where did Sega go wrong? How could they have forgotten that Sonic’s focus is not purely speed? More importantly, how could they AUTOMATE the running process? Those are my questions to the developers of Sonic Unleashed, which is probably mostly done by now – and my challenge to Sega for their next Sonic game is to bring the focus back to level design. Kill the speed, and give us a Mega Man 9-style rehash of the old Sonic games, but with the beautiful 2.5D graphics I saw in the original Sonic Unleashed leaked videos.

Before I close, I want to express that the developers of Sonic Advance and Soninc Advance 2 really got it right. A part of the Sonic series I barely mentioned – the soundtrack – is something particularly prominent here. The Sonic Advance series brought back good music to the Sonic games, and then Sonic Rush took it away. Kill the guitar, give me melodies. Whoever developed Sonic Advance 1 and 2, take charge of the next Sonic project – bring the level design back, sap the excess speed from Sonic’s current iterations and make it into a game that will not only revive the blue blur, but make him into the household name he should still be today.