Sonic the Hedgehog in 3D - A Retrospective

I am begging for people to stop calling shadow the hedgehog bad especially now that we have shadow reloaded

Liam triforce REALLY out here thinking he could get me to not skip a stupid Ad...

You skipped two wii games

Awesome video I still come back and rewatch it every so often

I feel like a lot of the platforming sections in Colors are faster than people make them out to be. Whenever I see people play like Aquarium Park Act 2, they usually go about it jumping from platform to platform, waiting on the switches to move them around and using the cube wisp. That's fine, but that isn’t the only way to play the level. Using the boost (or air dash if you don't have that), and the stomp can speed up the stage and make it more fun than going the normal way. Of course you can't do that for levels like Aquarium Park Act 5, Starlight Carnival Act 3 and Sweet Mountain Act 4 (well unless you're some speed runner that knows the glitch or are playing Ultimate and can use the Jade Wisp shortcut) but levels like those are outliers.

Shadow the Hedgehog is a good game. You're a NPC.

All these games are dogshit 😂

I personally like Adventure 1,2 Heroes, Unleashed and Generations. In the case of Adventure 1,2 Heroes and Unleashed I do have my issues but the positives outway the negatives. Every other 3D sonic else ranges from eh to Jesus Christ I never want to play that again. But again that’s just my personal opinion

HOW COULD YOU LEAVE OUT SONIC R??

I will say sonic adventure 2 is much better

Such a shame that you're apparently not making Sonic videos anymore. I really did enjoy your analysis (analysises?) on the series, and they only made me appreciate Sonic, and the art of game design as a whole, even more. I suppose I could just ask here (even if you will likely not respond) but what are your thoughts on the Sonic Frontiers updates? Update 3 in particular seems to be pretty divisive due to difficulty, curious to see what your thoughts are on that, and how the DLC affects Frontiers' quality. I myself quite like the new features they implemented, and am hoping to see this type of post launch support in more Sonic games.

Ironically since I've gotten Sonic Frontiers i've been trying to get the S rank on 1-2 to absolutely no avail! So glad he mentioned that😂

btw Nights gameplay is the special stages in the fan game sonic robo blast 2

I’m a HUGE Sonic fan. I’ve liked every game I’ve played so far. But I gotta say I think Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is the best game in the series. It’s a masterpiece in every way. I love that game so much.

Talks shit about unleashed but praises frontiers, nothing less to expect from a breath of the boring fanboy







Edit: also ean flinns characterisation of the sonic characters are horrible they're so freaking bland it's rediculous 😂😂😂

I love this vídeo. It's inspires hope

For the first time I really feel hope for this franchise. Sonic Team seemingly finally overcoming their fear of everything 06 failed at and Kishimoto making a twitter account to listen to our criticism even the updates fixing a lot of them

My only complaint is that the story of the games weren't mentioned that much (especially 06 and Colors). Other than that, I really enjoyed this vid.

At some point Sonic felt like these bad movie video game adaptations. Whenever I saw a new game collecting dust on the store shelves I went went "huh, another one of these". I just ignored them and assumed they're another badly programmed attempt at a new Sonic game. Even as a teen I remember thinking that.

My first Sonic game was SA2B when my brother brought it home one day. It was my first platformer and I actually loved it a lot. But not for the Sonic gameplay. No, I was so entranced by the Chao Garden, the slowly morphing and completely individual looking little blobs, that I played SA2B for dozens of hours despite me being awful at platformers, just to collect ressources to pour into my Chao. In a way, the Chao were what inspired me to replay my favorite levels over and over, not the ranking system. I'm definitely not the target audience, but I kind of like how the Chao added an alternate motivation to replay stages and get better at them, besides the ranking system (which I never really cared about). As a result I pretty much dropped off the Sonic train then and there too. It's a bit of a shame really, because I think the feature could have kept working as a way to get less rank-inclined people into the series - kinda like how the multiple characters seemed to cater to different people's likes and dislikes. I for one actually liked the Eggman and Tails gameplay, because seeing enemies explode all at once is VERY satisfying. Gamma is great too.

But, I guess in a way, this also exemplifies the "what even IS Sonic" question. It's such a weird realization I had, that I liked SA2B for a lot of things that were NOT the main focus at all. Sonic is the only series I can think of where that happened to me.

Why do people who talk about what's wrong with 06 never mention that the entire reason it's so unfinished and broken is because they suffered a server crash that erased months of work that hadn't been properly backed up and Sega corporate refused to give them a deadline extension so they were forced to take what they had and make a desperate attempt to make it at least playable. Sega corporate seems to really suck at knowing anything about developing games despite somehow finding so much success in doing so. So many bad Sonic games have come out 100% because of corporate meddling and stubbornness. That's a big part of why Xtreme was canceled; corporate refused to give them an extended release date despite forcing them to start over with a different engine because the person who developed the NiGHTS engine wasn't playing nice. But hey, they're unionizing now so we may well see corporate lose the ability to make such stupid decisions and rush things out the door unfinished.

"apPRIciate" lol

you play as amy in sonic 06? the fuck has anyone else mentioned this as this is my first time hearing this

As someone who played these all at once, along with the 2d titles a few years back of the course of a summer, I can say, since I only gave each one a single playthru, the 3D titles were the ones I preferred. The 2Ds, even Mania, are games that want/demand you play them several times to learn the tricks of the engine, or to find the optimal routes and stuff.

The 3Ds tend to give you just enough play and forewarning that you can intuit a lot of those on your own, without the need to die and try again...I will add thanks to a lack of copies in my local stores I never got to play 06 or Shadow, which disappoints, as I did find things like Black Night, Secret Rings, and others, which played fine.

:)

HELL YEAH SAMMY TIGHE THUMBNAIL

I just finished sonic adventure for the first time and I gotta say big isnt THAT bad. He definitely has the weakest campaign and couldve been written out but honestly with his lure upgrades getting froggy only got easier and easier till stage 4 where it was absolute light work I barely tried lmao. His theme song is pretty catchy and I dont know why but his line after finishing stage 4 "I dont know anyone who will try to save us both" made me really sad like damn :(

Cool

nice

Also I also dropped off the Sonic bandwagon for awhile. I thought Forces was okay. The war narrative was kinda neat. But I gave up after that. I have a crap ton of Sonic merchandise too I love the Blue Blurr. But I didn’t even pay any attention to the release of Frontiers. No interest. Now after watching this I’m definitely going to go buy that game.

Doggin on my homies in team Chaotix?!! WUSSUP?!!! Luckily for you the videos you produce are flawless. But man I thought Espio was just so dang cool!

all i can say is get rid of boost and bring back spindash

Whether you think it's a 3D entry or not, Sonic 3D Blast is a great game.

Crush 40 was legendary

System were you playing sonic adventure 1 and 2 on here? because it sure as heck wasn't the dreamcast.

Dis is not sonic 06 is sonic Bestiality 06

the character boss fights in adventure are awesome it’s rare in a game that an enemy or boss feels equal to your power

Cool video but I wish you had spent more than 2 minutes discussing Shadow the Hedgehog. People just dismiss it.

Damn the SA1 section is pretty much it's own video essay,

I've been a Sonic fan all of my life (grew up playing all of the games I had access to) and Unleashed has been my favorite Sonic game since it came out basically because tbh I actually find the Werehog levels fun (on top of all the other great things it has in it). Sure the combat isn't Devil May Cry or Bayonetta (which I have also played all of) or God of War level but I really feel like you can see how hard they actually thought about how the combat system worked.

The levels themselves vary in quality (Eggmanland is torture) but the times I do find myself going back to that game I do like to replay some Werehog levels and not just stick to the daytime boost levels. I completely get why people don't like it though since it is very slow and yeah not anywhere near "complex" but considering it's just one half of the game, I don't really expect it to be on the level of game series where it's their entire thing.

Also one note about the Gamma campaign of Adventure, I hard agree that it's one of the most compelling Sonic stories ever told and honestly it comes out of nowhere considering the general tone of a lot of the rest of the game (and the fact that this was their first crack at substantial storytelling due to it being the first 3D game). But I honestly felt like the ending of Black Knight (I think that game is underrated) still hits harder because of the way Sonic handles the situation and the message he is trying to get across (even if it is a bit cheesy in some aspects of the way it's handled but Sonic and narrative cheese go hand in hand usually).

Also also one thing I like about the writing of 06 is how Shadow works for G.U.N. because I feel like that's actually a natural evolution of his character and showing him actually continuing to act on the promise that he made to Maria (kind of feels like them course correcting him narratively from what the Shadow the Hedgehog game did to his character, too bad that all gets thrown out of the window due to the degradation of the writing in Colors onwards). 06 and Forces to me are both games that have good ideas and potential to be something special but the execution was so spectacularly awful or mediocre (whether it be due to mismanagement or time crunches).

Forces has some actually interesting things it could have done with the plot and gameplay wise the avatar could have been fleshed out WAAAAY more, and on that note, I think Capital City in Forces is a glimpse into what the rest of the game could have been if Infinite was used in an actually compelling way.