Sonic 3 introduces a new antagonist. Look at Knuckles the echidna taking those chaos emeralds, or firmly jumping on a big button to send Sonic and/or Tails tumbling downwards, like he’s the shadow self in Prince of Persia or something. But ah, if you play Sonic & Knuckles, the soon-released successor, it turns out that Knuckles wasn’t a bad guy. Just misled! He was taking reasonable decisions based on what he knew. Perspective changes things.
Look at Sonic 3 from a 1994 perspective and it is a triumphant continuation of a success that was propelling Sega’s Mega Drive into a dominant position in the UK console market and an ever bigger position in the UK video games market as a whole. Look at it from another historical end, the one that carries the power-up known as hindsight, and things look different. It’s not until I reach 1999 that I will be writing about another Sonic game; Sega stopped making consoles not so long after that. Barring surprising future developments, in writing about Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 I will already have covered half of the mainline Sonic games I will ever have to.
From here there is only down. Sonic 3 is either the peak before the fall or the start of the fall.
The case for the fall already starting is easy. Sonic 3 is, literally, half a game, put out to meet a deadline and reliant on a later ingenious bodge to bring it together with Sonic & Knuckles as the other half. Sega got in on episodic content very early! And they heard you liked cartridges, so they let you put a cartridge in your cartridge etc.. The result is that Sonic 3 has a desultory six worlds to play through, its time dragged out by 3D puzzle game bonus levels which quickly become a lot more tiresome than their Sonic or Sonic 2 equivalents.
At least those levels show some invention though. The same can’t be said for any of the rest of the game, which in gameplay is functionally identical to Sonic 2, itself hardly a big change from the original. Even the locations feel like barely altered versions of those from previous games. It partly comes from having arrived so fully formed, but it’s clear that Sega had no idea where to take Sonic the Hedgehog next and so they just go round the same loop again one more time.
Even the case for Sonic 3 as Sonic’s peak relies in part on talking about how badly Sega screwed up afterwards. Sega didn’t even manage to make a proper Sonic game for their next proper console, the Saturn, a not insignificant part of the console failing in the West (it was fine in Japan, where it was home to 44 #1 games, one of the first being a strip Mahjong title). Anything after that was too little too late, even before Sonic became a byword for poorly-conceived and poorly-made games.
One more go around the same loop doesn’t have to be a bad thing, though. In video games especially, iteration makes sense as a way of working towards perfection. Sonic 2 was great, and here is the same great with another set of little tweaks to make it greater still. Changes may only be in the form of different set pieces, but what set pieces!
By the end of the first level, the whole zone has been spectacularly firebombed, a tinder-dry landscape given a delirious heat-haze. Watching Sonic get spun around in the pool at the end of the Hydrocity Zone, or cling onto what he can as water gushes through passages, is another delightful feat of animation. There are more cool devices than ever, like the things you have to spin against to raise platforms up in the Marble Garden Zone. Being allowed to play as Tails and fly your way around is a nice change of pace and a clever way of varying difficulty and allowing the less expert player to see more of the spectacle. Carnival Night Zone is Carnival Night Zone. Sonic 3 just more Sonic, but Sonic 3 is the most Sonic.
Mega Drive chart, Edge 009, June 1994