It has finally happened. I've beaten Sonic '06... and I can muster no hatred for it whatsoever. It is, quite obviously, an unfinished mess of a video game. It is full of bad decisions. Each level has at least one poorly conceived piece of nonsense which greedily consumes either a player's time or their stock of lives. The automation of its spectacle setpieces cannot be trusted. Sonic '06 is a game that must be played safe. Flirting with shortcuts will only invite destruction. Its story crumbles to dust under the weight of a single glance of scrutiny. Its voice direction is simply wrong in so many places. On an actual Xbox 360 hard drive rather than my PC's SSD, the loading times are so horrific that I would never, EVER recommend that anyone play it in that way, which until about a decade after its release was the only possible way to play Sonic '06.

And yet... this was fun. I had fun with Sonic '06. More than I have had with Sonic Heroes. I don't know if this makes me a defender or a hater.

If the loading screens weren't so unbearably frequent and long, I probably would actually have played this game more since it's the closest thing to Sonic Adventure 3 we'll ever get, and as such, the game is bizarre, over-dramatic, and hilarious. Far, far, far away from being the "worst game ever". It's not even the worst Sonic game...other than the dang loading screens. Let me put it this way, people are still talking and thinking about this game 14 years later. That in itself makes it more memorable and valuable than 90% of other games that come out.

This game is interesting in that alot of its game issues can be fixed by wiping out half of the playable cast, redo level design and retool controls and physics and basically clean up the bugs.


But man...you can't fix that story. You can't fix the english VA. You can't fix the crunch. You can't fix the sole fact that the game peaks at the opening cutscenes. You probably can but good luck.

Still better than Shadow