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Retro Which of the 'controversial' Sonic platformers do you defend?

Best 'bad' Sonic game?

  • Shadow the Hedgehog

  • Sonic '06

  • Sonic and the Secret Rings

  • Sonic Unleashed

  • Sonic and the Black Knight

  • Sonic the Hedgehog 4

  • Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric

  • Sonic Forces


Results are only viewable after voting.

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It has been almost 20 years since the Sonic franchise entered a shaky period of its life, in which the legendary video game series started to lose a lot of the prestige it gained during the Genesis / MD and Dreamcast days. Starting with Shadow the Hedgehog in 2005, Sonic Team got caught into a streak of releasing games of questionable quality. Some of you probably know that after the critical and commercial success of Sonic Colors and Sonic the Hedgehog 4 in 2010, Sega did this epic move that consisted of paying retailers to remove all of the Sonic 3D platformers released between 2006 and 2009. However most of you are aware that 2010 wasn't the end of the roller coaster of quality that is the Sonic franchise, as controversial Sonic platformers still continued to release either coming from Sonic Team themselves or other developers like Big Red Button.

A quick summary of every 'controversial' 3D Sonic platformer:

Shadow the Hedgehog
A spinoff of Sonic Adventure released at the tail end of the 6th generation. In the story department, Shadow the Hedgehog is an amazing cultural product of 00s edgelord culture, but unlike Devil May Cry and other classics, Shadow's game is not very polished to say the least.

Sonic the Hegdehog (2006)
Sonic '06 is a great candidate for "The Room of video games" due to its legendary "so bad it's good" reputation that applies both to its gameplay, as well as to its 'literary' elements.

Sonic and the Secret Rings:
An Arabian Nights themed Sonic game and the first installment of the Storybook sub-series, which consisted of Wii exclusives with lower budget than HD games like '06 and Unleashed. Although many don't know about the existence of this game, Sonic and the Secret Rings has gained quite a bit of likers over the last years.

Sonic Unleashed
The first HD game post '06. Sonic becomes a Werehog in this game and goes through various beat' em up sections while being in that form. As you can imagine, the Werehog aspect of this game wasn't very well received, but the standard platforming sections have received plenty of praise retroactively.

Sonic and the Black Knight
The second and final installment of the Storybook sub-series, now with an arthurian motif. Sonic has a sword in this game. Also, can I say that this game's art direction is reaally bad? That color palette is nasty.

Sonic the Hedgehog 4
A Pac-Man 2 situation, where a small humble project gets a name which comes with expectations that will never be met. In this case, Sonic Team decided to make a spinoff platformer designed for phones, but for some reason the game got marketed as the sequel to the Genesis / MD classics. Episode I was well received back in the day and restored faith in the franchise, but people were more critical for the second episode.
With the third episode getting cancelled, Sonic Mania retconning Sonic 4 from the timeline and the first two episodes not getting ported to current platforms, I think it's fair to say that Sega doesn't want you to remember this game.

Sonic Lost World (?)
A Nintendo exclusive game that didn't get the rave reviews of Colors or Generations, but was well-received within the fanbase. I omitted this game from the poll because I believe this game isn't that controversial nowadays, with many considering it to be pretty solid.

Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric
A WiiU exclusive developed by Big Red Button, a studio formed by ex-Naughty Dog veterans. I don't think this game needs an introduction – it's Sonic '06 over again, but prettier and with less memes.

Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal / Fire and Ice (?)
Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal released for the 3DS on the same day as Rise of Lyric. Both games were critically panned, but Shattered Crystal was championed by some as being okish and not as messy as Rise of Lyric. It seemed that Sega was satisfied with Shattered Crystal's reception that they gave Sanzaru, the developer of said game, the green light to make Sonic Boom: Fire and Ice on the 3DS. Fire and Ice was way better received that Shattered Crystal and it's also notable for being the only game in the 3DS to use Unreal Engine 4.
I omitted these games from the poll as I don't think they are very controversial.

Sonic Forces
The stars were aligned in 2017 for a Sonic renaissance after Sonic Mania became an instant classic, and Sonic Forces was looking good with its 4 years in the oven and its character creator. What happened after Forces released? well, let's just say that an overwhelming amount of people thought that Mania was the better Sonic game of that year.
Sonic Forces is a very interesting case of Poe's law. The character Infinite and Sonic being a POW look like a shitpost from afar, but many players thought that Sonic Team was being unironic on this one.


Which of these games deserved a better reception? For those legends who completed all of the above: what is your personal favorite?
 
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Unleashed is actually awesome, and aside from their length I actually enjoyed the beat-em-up sections, gameplay-wise. I just thought the decision to have them feature the werehog made those sections and the overall story really really weird. I've said for years that if they had kept the gameplay the same but had the beat-em-up sections feature Knuckles instead, and tried to market it as something like a Sonic & Knuckles 2, it would've been received much better. I think.
 
None of them. Sonic games have always been bad.
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Though I didn't play it for an extended period of time (I did buy it a few years back), I REALLY admire what they tried with Secret Rings and will defend it for that. I think they should've ditched the multiplayer mode and had NOW PRO instead assist with the main single-player game and had better tuned the controls. But overall it CLEARLY was built better and turned out better than '06 ever did.

Just look at the HD E3 2006 vids I found and preserved, it looked awesome:


 
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The day parts of Unleashed are totally decent.

But I'm going for Shadow the Hedgehog just because of how it brings me back to the horrible wonderful awfulness of the Age of Edge in the mid 00s.
 
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sonic unleashed probably released a generation too soon given how badly the werehog's fur choked the systems it was on, and that's hard to divorce from its reception. but as the XSX BC shows, even the werehog sections had some merit to them if they had just been paced a little better and ditched the QTE combat

Sonic Forces was not terrible (barring Switch version) and most people just wanted to hate on it.
no, it was pretty terrible. it asks nothing of you as a player, is about 3 hours long and consists of nothing but straight lines and a milquetoast character editor. i was all in on a campy sonic game and bought it day 1, game's just bad.

people will try to pass it off as just inoffensively bland, but i can't even abide that. its blandness is incredibly offensive.
 
I actually haven't played any of these lmao. I stay a Sonic fan by not playing the controversial games. It's worked out pretty well so far.
 
Shadow - One of the few games that's so bad it's good. In some ways it's the closest thing we've ever gotten to a Sonic Adventure 3, though it's way jankier than either of those games and also stupid in how ambitious its branching stories are. There's not really a lot redeeming about this on paper but it's such a perfect encapsulation of what a kid in 2005 thought was cool.

Sonic 06 - I do think there's probably some kind of a good game buried at the bottom of this, but it's covered in so much jank and so many glitches that it's better experienced in a YouTube LP than actually playing it.

Sonic and the Secret Rings - If I had to pick one it'd be this. I've always been a bit scared to go back to it, though I recently watched some gameplay footage and it's mostly in line with how I remember it. It is strange, repetitive, simultaneously more and less ambitious than most of the games (there's a surprising amount of content in here for a launch window game and it's one of the only platformers I can think of designed entirely around motion controls, but the level design is on-rails, it's clearly made on a budget, and reuses a lot of assets). I like it a lot more than I don't, and I respect just how unique it is. I know the controls take some getting used to. I also dig the equip/RPG stuff, though I'll concede it's probably not what most want out of a Sonic game.

Sonic Unleashed - There seems to have been a reappraisal with this one over the years, or maybe it's just the zoomers who grew up with it actually being old enough to voice their opinions. I've seen people make he argument that the Daytime levels are the best pieces of Sonic content period. I....don't really agree with any of that, though. It's cool that there was an ambitious HD Sonic game, but the Warehog levels are genuinely pretty bad and they constitute like half of this. I also think that the games that followed were just more refined in terms of boost formula games, though this one might have the most complex level design out of all of them.

Sonic and the Black Knight - It's fine. Kind of takes out a lot of what makes Secret Rings so weird and unique. Makes it easier to pick up and play, but what you're left with is a low budget on-rails platformer with waggle controls that's fine in the context of being that.

Sonic 4 - I actually think sorta I liked this one, though it didn't really deserve to be called Sonic 4. The physics aren't in line with the older games but it was designed around them.

Sonic Lost World - Half of a great game. I love the engine this is on, and think it's more natural to Sonic than the boost formula. That level design though....woof. Basically just falls off a cliff about halfway through the game, and is arguably the worst Sonic's levels have ever been designed up until this point. The opening world is genuinely really great at least though, and I replayed it several times.

The Boom games - Never played these. I did watch a good portion of a playthrough of Rise of Lyric and it appears to cleanly be the worst Sonic game outside of the GBA port of Sonic 1. I did buy Fire and Ice at one point but I never got around to playing it, though supposedly it isn't bad and probably shouldn't even be listed with the rest of these at all.

Sonic Forces - Honestly this is also kinda so bad it's good, though I played through it in the context of laughing about it with a childhood friend I hardly ever see these days so my perspective is warped. Outside of that context it mostly just seems to be pretty bad; boost gameplay that's a lot less refined than Unleashed/Colors/Generations, all the stages are really fucking short, the avatar doesn't feel good to play as at all. It's short and easy so it's a fun little rental playthrough if you're nostalgic for the days of janky platformers, and the story is the most stupidly self serious a Sonic game had been in a while so I had fun with that aspect of it.
 
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On the threads topic, I still think sonic and the secret rings had almost everything to be a decent game, and it's clearly where the boost style gameplay originated so it has that going for it. It desperately needed a non motion controlled option and the skill tree toned down massively so that sonic controls better to start with and runs faster.

Those being the only complaints makes it far above everything else on the list.

So you've played like three Sonic games in the last fifteen years
Hey!

There's at least 6. The two sonic racing (never played team sonic racing enough to decide if there's 3) games, sonic mania, colours, generations and now frontiers.
 
Sonic 06. I'm a lot softer about it (and have been for awhile) because of understanding it's extremely troubled development and knowing there was a good game buried under it, since it's general design plan and level layout was good, just unfinished.

Also, I'm surprised you chose Unleashed over Lost World, mostly because reception was really good with Unleashed, even if the community is split on the Werehog (funny enough, I find the Werehog more enjoyable than the Day time stages, but mostly because I don't care at ALL for boost Sonic). Sonic Lost World is fairly controversial among the Sonic Community (and it's also another game I defend, as if they'd just changed a few things, it'd be a really decent game overall).
 
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I always thought 06 would be a pretty solid game if it wasn't broken so often. Even as a kid I was able to look past sooooo much jank because of how much I enjoyed what I perceived as an evolution of the Adventure style gameplay. I also think, if they didn't get so weird with it and lean into the dumb romance or melodrama, that the story could be decently compelling too.

It's just a preference, but I think in my heart I've always preferred what Sonic 06 was going for, even over all the 3D boost games (not Frontiers, I had waaaay more fun with that than 06.)
 
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I had some fun with Black Knight but even I can admit it and most of these are pretty damn bad. I can't defend any of them outside of maybe some of the music?
 
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I changed my vote twice. Shadow the Hedgehog is pretty bad, but at least it is short and the one that I might be more interested in touching again by resembling Adventure. Let me touch on the others I played.

Sonic 06 - Just a miserable time with all of the excessive loading and levels not working. Only the Silver campaign is decent because he moves the slowest and throwing things is fun.

Secret Rings - I think you could make an argument for this game being pretty decent despite some frustrating road blocks, but I never want to play it again. I stopped buying Sonic games after this one…

Sonic Forces - Until I got this one for a work thing that didn’t pan out. Out of the four here this is probably the best one in terms of being generally fine throughout, but like virtually every level ends before they even start minus like one cool pinball jungle level so it’s just kind of meh in the end. The character creator is cool at least.

To be clear, I’m replying to the poll question when writing this post since it’s different than the thread/title. I’ll defend none of these games as being misjudged, though I’ll point to the things I enjoyed if someone were to say they were thoroughly terrible from start to finish I guess.
 
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Sonic Unleashed is my second favorite game. Not my second favorite Sonic game, my second favorite game overall. So probably that.
 
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I'm glad to see Unleashed getting some praise after the fact. Daytime gameplay is great, and to be honest my biggest issue with nighttime is the incredibly obnoxious battle music (doubly annoying because most of the ambient night music is actually really good). Eggmanland is also a fantastic level visually and thematically even if it has way, way too many questionable-to-awful design choices.

It also has FPS boost on Series, which is nice.
 
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Unleashed has legitimately good day stages. I think there's a good game somewhere there in the night stages, but the combat just isn't interesting enough, and the course layout too bland for it to work. I get the idea, but the execution was poor.

Sonic 4 is perfectly fine.

I think Sonic Heroes should probably be listed here, as that is a glitchy, messy game with an interesting idea (the teams) that I like quite a lot.
 
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C'mon.

I've played 4. I counted!
Hey!

There's at least 6. The two sonic racing (never played team sonic racing enough to decide if there's 3) games, sonic mania, colours, generations and now frontiers.
I don't think we're far removed enough from Frontiers' launch that it can be seen objectively within the Sonic cycle. Typically the current game will get defended for a while afterwards until there's sufficient distance that people no longer feel the need to innately stick up for it. I'm giving that one a 'Pending'.

I wasn't thinking of the racing games though. I agree the first two are quite good but... they're also more just Sega games. At least imo. The Sonic-centric one, funnily enough, is obviously the most controversial. In large part because they axed everything else.
 
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Shadow the Hedgehog is peak "So bad, it's good" videogaming

The rest are traaaaaaaaash (outside of Lost World, which is fine outside of story)
 
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Sonic Forces had the misfortune of launching directly after Mania, which is genuinely one of the best (not just for Sonic, everything.) games ever made. so it's reception was irreversibly tainted from having to go against it.

while it was extremely short, i definitely feel like it's reasonably fun for what it is. the custom character creation was a great feature despite the "hahaha sonic fans are so crazy!" jokes it generated. and people don't seem to realize Infinite was clearly meant to be an absurd character. his entire backstory is getting his ass kicked by Shadow, the original edgelord, and so he goes on a evil quest to prove himself to be even more cool and badass, not "weak".
even his theme is fairly on the nose about it, being a lengthy brag about how "dark" and awesome he is. compare it with Shadow's hero theme in his own game (or rather, the crush 40 remix in Sonic 06.) which is basically what Infinite's theme would be if he was an anti-hero.

Sega did this epic move that consisted of paying retailers to remove all of the Sonic 3D platformers released between 2006 and 2009.
they've been undoing this, thankfully.
Unleashed is backwards compatible on the Xbox One. and 06 was quietly thrown back on the 360 marketplace a few months ago.
 
Sonic Forces is imo the best 3D Sonic since adventure 2 and an excellent continuation of Mania. It really feels like a true celebration of the entire history of Sonic in a way Generations never could.

Secret Rings was a cool idea and had a great song.

Sonic 4 is worst game in the entire series imo that one is nasty. I didn't like Frontiers but at no point did I think even it was worse than 4.

Shadow the Hedgehog is my favorite sonic character but I don't like that game much at all. It's a funny idea but it's so damn long and worst of all Sonic and Shadow have horrible VA so playing it is suffering.

Sonic 06 is a game I want to like because it has some good story lines but I play that game for 5 seconds and have to turn it off. Really really really bad.
 
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You know, Secret Rings had something going for it. I think that theme song is hot garbage, and the multiplayer is plain bad. But! It is functional, mostly, and I remember having something resembling fun when I rented it way back when.

Sonic 4 may be my least favorite, though. The first episode was just a bland retread of the first (and worst!) Genesis game. The second was promising when I demoed it at PAX East, but then I got the review code and...woof. At least the other games aspired to be something. I have no idea why they even bothered pumping out two games like Sonic 4.
 
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I feel like Sonic Heroes is pretty controversial, I've seen a lot of dislike/negative opinions about it so I'd probably say that one, because tbh it's my favorite Sonic game. It's the closest to what my ideal Sonic game would be, which is basically a whole 3D game of speed stages like the Sonic/Shadow stages from SA2. I feel like Sonic Heroes is pretty close to that, the team mechanic can sometimes interrupt things a bit but I don't feel like it gets in the way too much.
 
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