The existence of this game is infinitely fucking funny to me. Like, imagine being a Sega fan back in September of 1996. You have owned a Saturn for over 2 years now (i know this is a review for the genesis version, but bear with me here for a sec). The Genesis hasn't let you down, so you have faith that Sega will deliver a breakout hit for their 3D console anyday now. A new Sonic game that will make that 399$ price tag and 2 years of waiting totally worth it. Meanwhile, your friends at school are talking about Super Mario 64, Crash Bandicoot, and how cool as hell those games are, and oh my gosh, the 3D!!! It's so amazing!!! But all you have is your Saturn. And unless you dipped your hands into Panzer Dragoon, or Nights into Dreams, neither of which proved to put the console on the map... you don't really have anything you can boast about. All you can do is wait, while listening to your friends talking about how they made all the right life choices.

But, November rolls around, and you finally get your Mario 64 competitor. And this is it. This is the representation of your revolutionary new console. Sonic 3D Blast. This utter fucking marketing lie of a title, is all you're getting for the foreseeable future. Sega simply couldn't deliver a 3D Sonic title in time to compete against everyone else, so they figured if they would just slap the word "3D" into their isometric pre-rendered platformer, it'd be enough to fool the dumb children who were unfortunate enough to put their faith in a game publisher. I mean, I guess at this point you have something you can talk about to your school friends. But are you really going to?

Within historical context, I consider 3D Blast to be a disaster of comedic proportions. This one game single-handedly disqualified Sonic as Mario's rival for the rest of eternity, even if people may have not felt this at the time. From here on out, there was no more consistency to be found in a Sonic game, no gurantees made, all expectations belonged to the fools, fools such as me. Whereas Mario was an experimental playground with consistent rules, Sonic began to no longer care about rules, cohesion, or its audience as a whole. We have now entered an era where Sonic just kinda does whatever the fuck it wants. Sometimes, this leads to some great things, other times it doesn't. Next to Knuckles Chaotix, Sonic 3D Blast is one of the first examples of where it really doesn't.

Taking out all historical context however, it's not like 3D Blast is the spawn of satan, or anything... by itself, this is just a very okay game. Probably the biggest mistake it commits is citing one of its inspirations as Sonic Labyrinth, which I cannot imagine anyone in their right mind doing today. But, as a whole, it's functional, beatable, and even a casual player could see its true ending. We were only just exiting out of the age of insanely difficult games mind you, so having something like this back then was pretty nice. That is, if you cared less about challenge, and more about just having an experience that doesn't frustrate you.

Perhaps this is my just my fondness for collect-a-thons coming out, but I do enjoy the loop of exploring a level to find the 5 flickies required to progress onward. Labyrinth influences aside, it's pretty difficult to get lost in here, everything is very contained and exploration segments are segregated into digestible chunks. It's doable, and that's good. The bad, is that once you've cleared one level, you've basically seen them all. The only thing that sets them apart from there on is visual variety, but the gameplay loop fails to introduce new elements at a consistent enough rate to not make every level feel like you're doing the same thing. Perhaps introducing more inventive ways of catching flickies would've helped, alongside new types of flickies that behave in different manners. But the game shows all its cards in just one stage. From there on, you catch them in the exact same way, every single time.

I think it also goes without saying that a game like this absolutely does not lend itself to the style of gameplay that Sonic is known for. Being originally created for the Genesis, means that the isometric field of view can't be too large, and the field of view being like this means that you can't make Sonic go too fast, lest you'll be running into obstacles all the time. So, out goes the speed that Sonic is primarily known for, in favor of a leisurely jog. Which in hindsight, makes me realize that this game could've probably made a lot more sense if they didn't use Sonic for it at all. But, that'd of course means less copies sold, so here he is. In name only.

I've never been a big fan of the previous special stages that accompanied the classic Sonic games, and the ones found here aren't all that better either, buuut... they are pretty easy. This leads back into me saying how even a casual player could see the game's true ending, as it honestly takes very little effort to access the special stages in this game. And the special stages themselves are shockingly banal, a literal short-width bridge you run straight across, with some spikes you occasionally jump over. Missing the rings here is near-impossible, they all last less than 20 seconds, and there is barely any difficulty ramp-up to speak of. As long as you explore the stages a tiny bit, you'll get the 7 chaos emeralds in no time.

Interestingly, the Saturn version completely redid the way its special stages work. While the rest of the game was created by Traveller's Tales, I hear that Sonic Team stepped in for the Saturn special stages. And get this: They're the best part of the game, and a huge reason to play that version of the game over this Genesis counterpart. They're like the Sonic 2 special stages, but done right. They're in actual proper 3D, ensuring smooth scrolling and movement, Sonic himself feels pretty good to control in them, and they're just better designed, maintaining a good flow throughout. If the entire game was just an endless runner version of these stages, I'd hop into it more often. Unfortunately as it is, they're just one small good part of an ultimately mediocre package.

But wait! There is something else I can praise about this, and - you guessed it - it's the soundtrack! I have absolutely no idea what caused Jun Senoue to score Sonic Superstars the way he did, because if you go back all the way here... he did the entire soundtrack for the Genesis version of 3D Blast, and it's great! This is what I'm talking about! It feels like an extension of the music found in Sonic 3. Same style, same general instrumentation, but more strong melodies, and a unique song for every single act. The CD Audio soundtrack composed by Richard Jacques for the Saturn port is no slouch either. It's a very different style compared to the type of Sonic music we're generally used to, but it's very bright, cheery, and nostalgically welcoming. Completely unlike Richard, when he finds out people make covers of his songs!

Well, in any case, a good soundtrack and a series of excellent special stages for a specific port of the game is not quite enough to save the whole thing. It's only enough to elevate 3D Blast into a totally passable experience. It sure as heck functions, but it couldn't have been possibly made in a worse time and place. Accompanied by a true follow-up to Sonic 3 & Knuckles, 3D Blast could've been remembered as a neat distraction for when you're bored. In the present reality however, 3D Blast IS the Sonic 3 & Knuckles follow-up, whether that was its intention or not. The circumstances made it that way. Now, that's all I'll remember it for. And the memory will make me giggle.

Keep in mind that I played an Enhanced version via Steam workshop...

Sonic 3D blast is underrated, the heavy focus on exploration really reminds me of Sonic CD, the idea of saving flicks was probably the thing that stuck out.

Boss fights were also not bad with of course great music like Boss Battle 2 (You should take a listen)

Levels are unique in design. My only problem is that this game is kinda sicking to play sometimes, like the perspective and the ground titles don't work with the player in mind

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.

It is better than I remembered. The isometric view is actually impressive and I LOVED it's soundtrack. The gameplay is mixed: sometimes you gotta go fast but most of the time you have to be cautious. That variability felt balanced for me, unfortunately I can't say the same about the combat and the platforming sections. Yes, you'll get used to the mechanics throughout the game, but it's clumsiness can be veeery frustrating, specially when fighting bosses. I liked exploring the stages by looking for Knuckles and Tails (who give you access to the special stages) even though I got stressed trying to collect the 50 rings needed. My biggest complaint is the fact that I just couldn't find Sonic's friends after Volcano Valley, don't know if it is possible though. I wish there were more continues, or at least more lives, 'cause getting a game over will push you back a lot. Despite its flaws, 3D Blast is a very fun game and worth playing if you like Sonic and wants an innocent challenge, with good music and beautiful 16-bits visuals.

I decided to replay the original version of 3D Blast after experiencing the Director's Cut (which I was pleasantly surprised by) and yeah- it didn't take me long to remember why I didn't care for the game before that version existed. It's sluggish and slippery as hell. And then there's the hit detection. My god, it's worse here than what I remembered especially with boss fights.

It's actually amazing just how much the aforementioned Director's Cut improves this middling experience. Do yourself a favor and just play that instead if you really want to get into this footnote in the Sonic timeline. The controls are far better, Sonic actually picks up momentum fairly quick compared to the 1996 original and the collision detection is a million times better. There is absolutely no reason to go back to this version in 2024 unless you just want to say you've played it.

Con esto doy inicio a mi maratón jugando a todos los Sonic "principales" en 3D por primera vez en mi vida, cada review irá con mi canción favorita de cada juego, además de intentar hacer un breve resumen de que me pareció cada juego.

Acerca de Sonic 3D Blast no sabia absolutamente nada, entonces mi primera toma de contacto fue totalmente ciega así que... Como inicio esto...

En vez de optar por lo que se supone que debería ser la formula que es la velocidad, decidieron irse por la exploración de áreas en busca de enemigos que se puedan matar, los cuales te sueltan pájaros de distintos colores, los cuales debes rescatar para poder ir avanzando por los niveles, esto en si no es malo, sin embargo a un Sonic ser asi de lento no lo favorece.

Jugablemente si me genera conflicto, Sonic tiene mantequilla derretida en sus zapatos, y se nota demasiado en como se resbala, los controles son bastante torpes, y como si fuera poco de repente hay secciones de saltos un tanto precisos, los cuales llegan a ser un infierno hacer, el nivel de hielo ya ni les cuento como se resbala el personaje (aunque no fue tan dificil como esperé), además que las profundidades del juego son muy confusas, muchas veces fallé saltos por no saber donde estaba saltando, ni cuanto tenia que hacerlo, SIN EMBARGO, encuentro que el mapeado de los niveles es bastante bueno, no tengo nada más que decir con respecto a esto.

Donde más destaca el juego es en la música (la cual recuerda demasiado a esa época del Sonic clásico), teniendo canciones muy distintivas y que acompañan bien a los niveles, y personalmente en el arte, es muy bonito gráficamente y como juega con ese tipo de 3D que tiene.

Más allá no puedo decir nada, es un juego bastante corto como suelen ser los Sonic clásicos y que sinceramente, no recomendaría.

Canción Favorita: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ys5p4ageAjU

Sonic 3D Blast is a much forgotten part of Sonic’s career, despite being the bridge between the classics and Sonic Adventure. Many elements such as the Spindash having its own button, to the homing attack actually originate here, though the homing attack is a shield power up in this game. Still 3D blast definitely had a hand in making Adventure what it is.

That doesn’t mean this is a great game, no it’s a bit of an oddball. Isometric games always come with certain problems, and a fast paced one is just asking for trouble. However the focus here isn’t really on high speed momentum based platforming, no it’s more about exploring these zones. Sonic still has natural flow to his movements, but he’s definitely pretty loose in handling, and it’s very easy to run into hazards.

This is a problme when the main focus of the game is destroying bad nicks and collecting the animals inside, who will the follow sonic until the end point of the section.. or if Sonic gets hit where they scatter all over the place. Some of these little creatures don’t seem to want help, as they will fly away from Sonic, which often leads to you pixel hunting for them, leading to you taking more damage and losing more birds… it’s not a great time.

Now I do think some of the levels have fun sections, and I really like the aesthetics in the game, especially on the Sega Saturn. But it doesn’t make up for the fundamentally annoying gameplay.

There are also chaos emeralds to collect in special stages, and these are all variations of the halfpipe from Sonic 2, collecting enough rings to pass. No matter what they are fine, and collecting them all will unlock the final boss, which is meh but hey.

3D blast isn’t awful, it’s just boring and pretty annoying.