For this month's TR theme of returning to games we failed to beat before, I don't know how I nearly forgot about this one. It was for years what I called my favorite of the Genesis Sonic games, and one I played more than any other on the Sonic and Genesis collections I had as a kid. Developed by Traveler's Tales (who would go on to make the Lego games~) and coming out in the very late year of 1996 and certainly a mechanical oddball in comparison to its fellow Genesis Sonic games, my general distaste for the traditional Sonic games made me gravitate to this one a lot more as a kid, and I'm glad to have finally seen the proper end of it. It took me a couple hours to get all the chaos emeralds and beat the final boss in the English version of the game via my PS3 copy of Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection.
The story, as one would expect, is pretty simple. The Flickies are a race of birds that have special powers. Robotnik wants to use them to get the chaos emeralds and conquer the world, so he crams them all into robots and takes over their whole island. Sonic is just trying to stop by Flicky Island to visit his friends there, but finds them all captured by Robotnik, so it's Sonic's job to stop him. A fairly standard premise for a Sonic game that then leads into the rather unconventional gameplay. This game is very unlike its 2D counterparts in many ways. The most immediate difference is that it's more-so 3D than 2D and has an isometric camera angle to boot, which can make it really awkward (and kinda painful) to play on a PS3 D-pad, but it makes more sense on the more circular Genesis D-pad. In my case, I largely played it with the joystick on the dual-shock 3 ^^;. Aside from that, your goal in each mission isn't to just get to the end of the stage, but you need to rescue all the Flickies to do it. This involves killing all the robots in the area (usually) to free them and put them in the big ring at the end of the area, and each Act has 2 or 3 of these interconnected areas. The chaos emeralds are also a bit odd, but more like Sonic 2 in how you get them. You need to find Knuckles or Tails in a level and given them some amount of rings (I believe it's 50 the first time and goes up by 50 each time you want to retry) to enter the mini-game, which is a sort of variation of the Sonic 2 special game as you run forward along a bridge collecting rings, avoiding mines, and not falling off. I personally think the Sonic 2 special game is awful, but this is probably my favorite emerald collecting game of all the Sonic games on Genesis, which is why I actually was able to get all seven of them to then fight the true final boss at the end XD. The only time I used save states in the game was to quickly retry the 6th and 7th emerald trials, and that was really just a time saving measure. You pay all of your rings to Knuckles/Tails to enter the special stage, and all of the rings on the level reset when you exit a special stage. There isn't even a time limit on the levels, so there's really nothing but your patience keeping you from trying over and over in most cases. The controls are decent, but take a bit of getting used to. Honestly, I'd probably recommend playing this on one of the later collections instead of the Genesis (or Saturn) originals because of just how well Sonic moves with a joystick as opposed to a D-pad XD. There are some nuances to how he controls that clearly lend themselves better to a D-pad (the emerald special stages in particular are far better played with a D-pad), but the general movement of the normal stages fit way better to a joystick for how I played it. The level design is overall really solid, as it actively takes into account just how awkward moving Sonic around can be. They never really have you doing anything that requires really precision jumps (or if they do, there's always a way around it), so just how hard it can be to get Sonic to land on a tiny platform is almost never an obstacle between you and victory. The enemies are largely just there to keep the Flickies from you, so your biggest obstacle in completing the game are the stage hazards, and they're also pretty tame. The only time you'll really run into places where you'll lose lives are the boss battles, but they're all good fun and varied in their design, and were some of my favorite bits of the game. Overall, this is a really good Sonic game for people not so familiar with games, as there are tons of extra lives and you don't die often either, generally. It's a pretty easy game, but that just made it all the more appealing to me XD. The game's presentation is pretty standard fare for the Genesis, that being it's heckin' excellent. The music is all fun and catchy, as a Sonic game should have, and the graphics are bright and colorful. As plastic and toy-like the graphics can seem at times (and with how odd some of Sonic's animations can look upon close examination), I think the game looks really good for what it is. Particularly for a Genesis game, I quite like how the game's aesthetic is, but I could understand someone thinking it was utterly hideous XD. Verdict: Highly Recommended. It's certainly an oddball among Sonic games, but it's definitely still one I like a lot. If you're looking for a good, weird platformer on the Genesis, even on the original hardware this won't break the bank. I'd still recommend playing it via some collection that gives you a joystick to work with like I had, but it's a great time either way. Not everyone will be able to gel with the controls or the aesthetic, especially if you're expecting a more traditional Sonic game, but if you're willing to take the dive on something just a bit different, there's a ton to enjoy here. An isometric Sonic game on the Genesis could've been a disaster, but I'll be damned if they didn't make a pretty darn fun one.
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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