[This post is part of a collaborative Sonic retrospective based around the games on Sonic Mega Collection Plus. To read more, please head over to the central post!
This one is written by Martin F, who most recently wrote about Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri]
The concept of Knuckles in Sonic 2 is about as straightforward, ‘does exactly what it says on the tin’ as it gets; it’s Sonic 2, except this time you play as Knuckles. My experience of playing it was not markedly different from my typical experiences playing original flavour Sonic 2 – I breezed through Emerald Hill, died a handful of times in Chemical Plant Zone, the deceptively difficult second stage (including falling into the floor trap that is cruelly placed just after defeating the zone’s end boss and gets me every damn time) and ultimately made it to the difficulty spike of Metropolis Zone before getting a game over.
Knuckles has slightly different moves from Sonic, including a wall climb ability that lets him reach previously inaccessible areas, but, unlike in Sonic 3, this turns out to be largely superfluous in this game. Which makes sense – these levels weren’t built with Knuckles in mind, so the areas that were previously inaccessible don’t actually have anything particularly interesting to access. The original game is well constructed to give the illusion that there is a bigger world to explore with secrets around every corner, but it is just an illusion. Move the lens a little to the side, and the cracks start to show. OK, so maybe there is something interesting to explore there. Let’s move the lens even further still. What is Knuckles doing here in the first place? Any attempt to answer this in-universe must be a huge retcon, given the story of Sonic 3. So let’s step out into the real world.
Sonic 3 was released in an extremely unfinished state, with half of the intended levels, half of the intended story, and two thirds of the intended playable characters. Rather than delay the release date, Sega decided to essentially release the game in two installments, prefiguring the rise of DLC by about a decade. To do this, they created a unique and honestly just absolutely wild ‘lock-on’ technology for cartridges of Sonic & Knuckles, allowing players to join them together with their copy of Sonic 3 and thus access the full, originally intended Sonic 3 experience. Of course, Sonic 3 cartridges were not built with this lock-on technology in mind – they were just the same shape as any other. This meant that other games could be inserted just as well as Sonic 3. So, clearly, something had to happen when players did this.
That something, in the case of Sonic 2 at least, is Knuckles in Sonic 2. It’s well constructed to give the illusion that Sonic & Knuckles was a release bursting with bonus content, but it is just an illusion. Smoke and mirrors from snake oil salesman, designed to distract from the fact that they charged punters twice for the same product. Move the lens a little to the side, and the cracks start to show.