Thoughts on Two Thirds of a Game
I've been making a concentrated effort this year to patch a few gaps in my hedgehog knowledge and spent the past several months playing through a number of Sonic the Hedgehog games I hadn't before, or which I hadn't played in a lifetime. Following the completion of the Big One - Sonic 06 - I thought I was done in terms of what could be considered mainline games - and then I randomly remembered about Sonic the Hedgehog 4.
I had completely memoryholed Sonic the Hedgehog 4 because it was complete disinterest at first sight. When it was first announced it felt like a desperate act of attempted course correction: after the mixed release of the last couple of 3D Sonic titles, how better to pander to the dismissive voices than to make a literal sequel to the Mega Drive games that so many critics still considered the peak of the series? And though those original games are great, even classics, I had really enjoyed all the 3D titles I had played through the 2000s and in fact, it was 3D Sonic that had turned me from a Sonic enjoyer into a dedicated fan. So, the whole project just felt off to me from day one - and the announcement of the episodic release format, all the rage in the late 2000s, further turned me off. When even people who were the target audience for Sonic 4 didn't seem to like it, I considered ignoring it was the right thing to do. But here we are.
The episodic gaming trend - releasing games in self-contained chunks one at a time, where real-time feedback after each episode could influence the next one - died relatively quickly after Valve first attempted to make it into a thing, and Sonic 4 is a great example of all the flaws with it. Really, there is no Sonic 4 in itself: there's Episode 1 and Episode 2, and they are very different things.
Sonic 4 Episode 1 is everything I thought and feared the project would be. Every single design decision has been made with the same end goal in mind: "hey guys, remember Sonics 1 to 3??". The zones, the enemies and even most of the bosses are recycled from the first few Sonic games with barely any trace of original ideas included at all. It's like playing a fan game reusing assets from the official games, but those typically play in a fairly solid fashion because they re-use everything else from the old Sonic games too. Sonic 4 Episode 1's only real additions of its own are awkward lighting effects which especially effect Sonic in a very ugly fashion (and further highlights the odd mishmash of modern and classic aesthetics the game is full of), the introduction of the homing attack from the 3D games which behaves erratically and generally janky physics - so basically all in all it behaves worse than those fan games. It's about as mediocre as Sonic games get and proof that simply pandering to the classic heads without putting any thought into the matter can never result in anything good.
Sonic 4 Episode 1 effectively put the nail in the coffin of the entire planned episodic trilogy right from the start. But Episode 2 was already being worked on, with the feedback from Episode 1 rerouting the path the development took. In the end, it took two whole years to arrive and by that point even the people who had been vaguely positive about Sonic 4 just couldn't care less. Episodic gaming was great, right??
The problem here is that Episode 2 is actually pretty decent - you could even say good? It is still wholly indebted to the Mega Drive games but now there's a touch of something original to it: the familiar zone types are mashed together and they feature new gameplay ideas and setpieces, the bosses do not simply repeat old glories and towards the end of the game the developers deliberately begin to take advantage of the possibilities brought by the new engine and it all gets a bit more grand. Tails is now tagging along with Sonic just as he was in Sonic 2 (this episode's direct inspiration), but the dynamic duo have a handful of action moves they can perform together which are utilised in various ways throughout the story. The homing attack is still a little awkward but otherwise the physics feel better and the lighting issues have been fixed, and the game actually looks pretty decent. Even the music is pretty excellent throughout after the largely humdrum soundtrack of the first episode.
To put it all in a nutshell: I completed Episode 1 because I felt like I had to. I completed Episode 2 because I actually genuinely enjoyed it enough to do so. You still have the inherent issue that it's a classic-style Sonic game whose only goal is to be a classic-style Sonic game instead of actually trying to add anything to the series, but the experience is now fun enough that you can look beyond that and just enjoy the whole thing for a little while.
(there's also Episode Metal which unlocks in Ep 2 if you own both games on the same platform. It's mainly just a decent bit of freebie filler: the short four-stage "campaign" never takes any unique advantage of playing as Metal Sonic, and so you basically have just play through a few familiar leves with slightly rejigged flow)
The third part of the trilogy never realised: following Ep 1's failures and the long delay between the two episodes, Episode 2 barely got a reception and so Sonic Team buried the remaining plans. This is not only rife what-if territory (imagine if they had kept the upwards trajectory?), but it also leaves the first two Episodes incomplete. Both episodes are only a couple of hours long each for a basic playthrough (some more if you want all the emeralds etc) and neither feel like complete games in their own right; playing the two one after another still leaves the feeling that you're only partway through the journey. They're like long demos of something larger that never then appears, and that vague sense of incompleteness further damages their appeal. The problem with simply trying to do another Mega Drive style game is that those original games continue to exist, and why would I ever feel like playing a facsimile trying to imitate the feel of them when I could just enjoy those rock solid classics directly instead?
I've now caught up with my backlog of Sonic game gap filling - there's still some side games that I haven't played, but that's a quest for another time. I was hoping to now hop back into Kingmaker: Wrath of the Righteous which I've been chipping away at for months, but now suddenly Sonic x Shadow Generations is right around the corner. And I also want to replay some of the older Sonic games I've already played. This hedgehog is my life now, isn't it?