Gotta go fast!

After Sonic Adventure has served as my personal gateway into the series and Sonic Adventure 2 gave me an even better experience, I can proudly call myself a fan of the series now. A fan who only played 3D Sonic. That being said, Sonic Origins opened up a whole new dimension to me: 2D Sonic!

Here's a quick rundown of the zones: Green Hill was surprisingly the least engaging zone for me, but I can appreciate it for how iconic it is and being a good introduction with a timeless theme. I didn't have an issue with Marble Zone's methodical approach for the most part, although some of the random pop-up spikes felt a little cheap. Spring Yard is fine, but gets repetitive after a while. Now, Labyrinth Zone seems to be pretty universally hated, but I didn't find myself having much of an issue with it and thought it was rather refreshing after going through Spring Yard, the underwater sections were cool. Star Light Zone had cool catapults and Scrap Brain was... rather hard compared to the rest of the game - but that makes sense, it's the last level for a reason! The final fight itself though was a bit underwhelming and the ending was cheap.

But in the end, I enjoyed my time with the Blue Blur's debut game, even if most of the level design goes against the whole "gotta go fast" motif, which apparently is a dealbreaker for many. And while 2D Sonic is fun, I'd be lying if I told you I didn't miss the homing attack from Adventure at first.

Reviewed on May 03, 2024


3 Comments


19 days ago

wahoo !

19 days ago

I feel sonic should (and probably was intended to) be more of a momentum game rather than a "go fast all the time" game. His inception was more of a slight against the aging hardware of the NES and to show how much faster the Genesis could be. So hearing that you felt Sonic 1 had more slow, methodical platforming than expected is something I'm happy you noticed. I think the 'gotta go fast' became more of a focus in the sequel.

10 days ago

yea definitely Sonic 1 is more of a momentum based platformer than the fast movement of the sequel, idk why it gets such flack for being so considering the whole "gotta go fast" approach was promoted later in the sequels(which I like btw, but its fine for a game in the series to have a different design philosophy)