For a game that was comprised almost entirely of misery for me for the first 6 hours, I'm surprised about how complicated my thoughts towards Sonic 06 became by the end, and how playing through the game had directly led me to better articulate the reasoning behind a lot of my opinions on experiencing art. In a lot of ways, Sonic 06 is a bad game, a terrible one even, one that will barely function in a lot of instances and is so rife with issues both in design and polish that it becomes a sight to behold, and yet, I had a weirdly good time with it, albeit not quite for the same reasons as a lot of people typically state. The insistence on the game's ambition being its big selling point doesn't really land for me all too well since I don't really think that the sense of scale here is much greater than what the 2 Sonic Adventure games had to show, and even if it did, everything was handled so messily here that I'd still find it hard to fully work for me regardless. This is a rare case where a game executes upon its ideas so poorly most of the time that I can't even appreciate them much from a conceptual standpoint because I'm just SO distracted by the way they never work, but it's a lot of this failure at being a formally good game at all that is the biggest draw of Sonic 06 to me, and not in a boring, ironic "so bad it's good" way either.
Being able to earnestly engage with "bad" art is a skill that more people should learn and become familiar with, they don't have to end up liking all of the things they end up checking out as a result, but the attempt at understanding such experiences is a worthwhile endeavour in itself, especially when you've already seen a lot in a particular medium and are beginning the generally understand the language and flow in how things are constructed. While this applies to art in general, I feel like this is especially the case for games due to the interactive component of them which not only forces the audience to more closely and actively engage with what's in front of them, but also brings about a stronger need to construct games with certain rules in mind. This links back to Sonic 06, a game that disregards some rules entirely, and attempts to follow others but flounders in doing so, a game that constantly defies expectations while trying to reach a point where it can meet them. One of the most prominent words I'd use to describe my time with Sonic 06 would be "refreshing" for this exact reason, as I was constantly having my preconceived notions on how a game "should" function be challenged, throwing me into a state of having to engage in thorough experimentation in places to make my way through, never quite knowing if I was missing something obvious, or if the game was wanting me to do something a bit nonsensical.
This isn't a game that I found some interest in despite its flaws, but rather because of them, creating a weird push and pull where each idiosyncratic interaction or decision was simultaneously the most infuriating thing ever while also being by far the most interesting constant. The game barely even works most of the time, trying to move during fast sections will get you killed, random bits of geometry will sometimes get you killed, things that are meant to be scary can break in such a way that makes them feel utterly benign, and most notably, the automatic sections meant to be pseudo cutscenes just don't properly work a lot of the time. Any time there was a part in the level that was clearly set up to make you automatically bounce from location to location, or run around a huge loop, everything immediately became scarier thanks to how unreliable these would be, with the game basically requiring you to plan out the angle you went into them to minimise chances of being entirely screwed over. The game being so ready to kill you for no reason contributed to one of its most infuriating elements as a whole though, that being the fact that if you lose all your lives, you need to start the stage over again, and since a lot of deaths could hardly be classified as your fault, it was an arduous process that made me more genuinely mad at a game than I have been in years probably.
This game is rough to say the least, but the brand of roughness it has going on is the kind of thing that I think people should experience from time to time, especially if they've played a ton of other games. It's different to games that intentionally break rules to play something that just, fails to follow them, seeing so many anomalous elements that try so hard to be something and just can't muster that up. This is a rare game that I feel is one that's justly disliked while I can still say that I found playing it more fun and interesting than the average person, and I completely get how someone could play this and immediately hate it, it's not an easy one to like. Silver's campaign sucks and throws in some of the most baffling bits of level design I've seen, Shadow's story is very up and down with both the game at its best and almost worst, and Sonic has mach speed sections which straight up didn't feel designed with this game in mind, it's just a constant battle against the game in order to hit a point where you can overcome its janky nonsense, but it's a pretty unique time even so. Other bits and pieces, such as the music and how cool the stages themselves tend to look are genuinely great elements as well, White Acropolis and Crisis City are big highlights especially, so it's not even all bad either. This game is weird, I don't really know how much I actually like it, but I also think that it's 100% a game worth playing to some degree at least, I've never been so conflicted about my thoughts on a game, but that's cool in its own way as well :)
Being able to earnestly engage with "bad" art is a skill that more people should learn and become familiar with, they don't have to end up liking all of the things they end up checking out as a result, but the attempt at understanding such experiences is a worthwhile endeavour in itself, especially when you've already seen a lot in a particular medium and are beginning the generally understand the language and flow in how things are constructed. While this applies to art in general, I feel like this is especially the case for games due to the interactive component of them which not only forces the audience to more closely and actively engage with what's in front of them, but also brings about a stronger need to construct games with certain rules in mind. This links back to Sonic 06, a game that disregards some rules entirely, and attempts to follow others but flounders in doing so, a game that constantly defies expectations while trying to reach a point where it can meet them. One of the most prominent words I'd use to describe my time with Sonic 06 would be "refreshing" for this exact reason, as I was constantly having my preconceived notions on how a game "should" function be challenged, throwing me into a state of having to engage in thorough experimentation in places to make my way through, never quite knowing if I was missing something obvious, or if the game was wanting me to do something a bit nonsensical.
This isn't a game that I found some interest in despite its flaws, but rather because of them, creating a weird push and pull where each idiosyncratic interaction or decision was simultaneously the most infuriating thing ever while also being by far the most interesting constant. The game barely even works most of the time, trying to move during fast sections will get you killed, random bits of geometry will sometimes get you killed, things that are meant to be scary can break in such a way that makes them feel utterly benign, and most notably, the automatic sections meant to be pseudo cutscenes just don't properly work a lot of the time. Any time there was a part in the level that was clearly set up to make you automatically bounce from location to location, or run around a huge loop, everything immediately became scarier thanks to how unreliable these would be, with the game basically requiring you to plan out the angle you went into them to minimise chances of being entirely screwed over. The game being so ready to kill you for no reason contributed to one of its most infuriating elements as a whole though, that being the fact that if you lose all your lives, you need to start the stage over again, and since a lot of deaths could hardly be classified as your fault, it was an arduous process that made me more genuinely mad at a game than I have been in years probably.
This game is rough to say the least, but the brand of roughness it has going on is the kind of thing that I think people should experience from time to time, especially if they've played a ton of other games. It's different to games that intentionally break rules to play something that just, fails to follow them, seeing so many anomalous elements that try so hard to be something and just can't muster that up. This is a rare game that I feel is one that's justly disliked while I can still say that I found playing it more fun and interesting than the average person, and I completely get how someone could play this and immediately hate it, it's not an easy one to like. Silver's campaign sucks and throws in some of the most baffling bits of level design I've seen, Shadow's story is very up and down with both the game at its best and almost worst, and Sonic has mach speed sections which straight up didn't feel designed with this game in mind, it's just a constant battle against the game in order to hit a point where you can overcome its janky nonsense, but it's a pretty unique time even so. Other bits and pieces, such as the music and how cool the stages themselves tend to look are genuinely great elements as well, White Acropolis and Crisis City are big highlights especially, so it's not even all bad either. This game is weird, I don't really know how much I actually like it, but I also think that it's 100% a game worth playing to some degree at least, I've never been so conflicted about my thoughts on a game, but that's cool in its own way as well :)