[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!
For this one I welcome for the first time Iain Farrell, who you can find on twitter as @iainfarrell.]
I’m just going to open with it at the top folks. I think Sonic 3 might be the best one. Now, before you reach for Twitter to take me to task, I’m fully aware that this is not a popular opinion so let me set out the foundation of my case.
It’s important to look at the game in context. Sonic the Hedgehog is a solid first entry. It leans heavily into its unique selling point, its speed. The team painted colourful locations under bright blue skies taking inspiration it seems from the fledgling 3D graphics of Sega’s arcade games. There was nothing quite like it, and I’m sure it was just what Sega needed to compete with Nintendo’s Mario series as the 16-bit era began in the ’90s. When Sonic 2 came along on “Sonic 2-sday” a year and change later, it built on that foundation. Adding a second playable character, some cool 3D bonus stages, and a split screen mode. It felt like that rarest of rare things, a confident and strong second album. Sonic 3 then, to me at least, feels like the experimental third album filled with inventive lute solos and monastic chanting. A product of a confident team on a roll who are willing to try everything. Sonic 2 too short!? Oh we’ll show you!
They turned everything up to 11 from the moment you turned on your Mega Drive. The white logo screen fades giving way to the most extravagant title screen you’ve ever seen. A massive 3D Sonic looms as you hit start and get into the game which opens with a cool cut scene. Sonic is being given a ride on the wings of Tails’ plane. He becomes Super Sonic, only to bump into a mysterious new antagonist, Knuckles the echidna. He loses the chaos emeralds in the process and as the baddies run off our stage is set. It’s an immediate statement of intent that tells you they’re aiming to more clearly tell a story this time.
So far, so Sonic, but the game then proceeds to swing for the fences, trying to do more than just iterate on what came before. Like all the best big swings it’s not universally successful which is probably why it isn’t the most beloved by fans, but almost 30 years later I can confidently say it’s my favourite. It was also the first game I finished in 2021 which is not a sentence I thought I’d write in a year that saw a new PlayStation and Xbox take up residence under the TV.
Sonic 3 is a very contradictory experience. On the surface it’s about speed, but then the levels are very densely packed which makes for frustrating first play throughs of them. The variety of power ups is exciting, but the first couple of times I got the fire shield I would accidentally tap buttons sending me shooting off a ledge or into enemies resulting in a lost life and at least one instance where a controller was placed on the ground before I went for a walk. Maddeningly it also still features under water levels, three levels that are, by design slow progress, although not as frustrating as the Kafkaesque Carnival Zone the music to which haunts my nightmares. The under water levels do feature my favourite little detail which is that there are balloons that when you pop them release air for Sonic to breathe.
The final stage was one of my favourites even though the game feels like it ends three times, with multiple boss battles. At one point I tweeted a friend in desperation, “why does it end three times?!”
His brilliantly simple reply? “Third game innit”.
A later ice level was so hard to actually start that according to my notes it “gave up and let me win”. I realise as I’m writing this that it’s very likely to put you off. Please don’t be put off. Keep playing because as you start to get into the flow and replay levels you start to achieve the level of understanding that the designers and developers wanted you to achieve. They are very deliberately setting a bar for you. Remember that when this game came out you couldn’t just quit and play something else on Game Pass or stick on Fortnite. You’d invested in this and they wanted to make it worth your while.
When I think back to the criticism levelled at Sonic 2, mostly for being too short I think that was actually a lot of players and critics at the time missing the point and I think Sonic 3 is a deliberate response. The Sonic games were always about practice and achieving mastery in the process. With Sonic 3 I think the choices around design like adding a save state and special stages that disappear once you encounter them only to return once you roll credits are explicit choices that make the game worth engaging with longer term.
The game is filled with challenges and some are extreme if you’re a casual player but I let them off because they’re making the game that they wanted to make and whether the choices they made map precisely to what I’d have done or not is irrelevant. It results in a far more interesting product at the end of it all and I would much rather spend time with a game like that than one which plays it safe. If you prefer the other entries, cool, no one is taking those away, but if you’ve discounted this game for any reason in the past I strongly encourage you to find a way to play it now, or pick up the impending remaster of the whole series coming to a modern console near you soon. I’m really glad I did.