(this is a long personal one, borderline life-storycore. sorry for those that dislike walls of text but sonic 06 does this to people. Sonic the hedgehog 2006? more like sonic the hedgehog 2006 word review)
I feel like if you are on the gaming pulse enough to be looking at a website like this, you likely already have at least HEARD of Sonic 06. Pretty much everything that could be said about this game on the internet already has been, it's really quite the overused topic both in the spheres of the sonic fandom and the sphere of bad game critics. Just in the sphere of youtube alone I've seen showcases of the many, MANY bugs and glitches the game contains, reviews of the game that dwell on it for uncharacteristically large amounts of time, personal retrospectives from fans recalling the impact the game has had on the brand as a whole, posthumous optimistic looks at the game dissecting vibes the game manages to retain in spite of its rushed nature, and the more recent phenomena, endearingly nostalgic takes towards the game from those that played it in their formative years. You could say that this game has had just as much of an impact on Sonic's brand as the previous game titled "Sonic The Hedgehog" (of which it has been a longer time between the present day and this games launch than the time between the two "Sonic the Hedgehog" games). It's certainly hard to say anything, let alone anything NOTEWORTHY about this game when everyone already knows what it is and why it is. All I can really contribute to the decades-rotten dead horse conversation is my own personal experiences with the game.
I'm a life-long sonic fan and despite being the correct age to have done so, I didn't grow up with this game. I definitely remember the launch hype cycle for this game, 6-year-old me frequenting the old Sonic Central website and looking at the promotional material for the game. I remember thinking that with the realistic environments and people that the sonic brand must have been taking a more adult turn after Shadow the Hedgehog, and since my family was still rocking the Gamecube as the sole household console, I was fine with sticking to the recently-released (yet equally mature in an incomprehensible sense) Sonic Riders and worrying about the fancy new Sonic game later when I was older. Given that I went on to own a Wii instead of any HD systems and wasn't a part of the greater internet at the time (as I should have been for that age), the release and subsequent car crash that was this games reception entirely eluded me. It wasn't until like, idk 2008/9ish? when I mentioned to a cousin that not much on the PS3 interested me besides "this game called sonic the hedgehog but not like the original one", and got laughed at for it that I realized that there might have been something up with this game, but I never thought much of it. I did always have a fascination with it in a curious way though, and whenever Silver was playable in any spinoff on the Wii, I always only played as him back then because he's from that mysterious sonic game I couldn't play! Imagine a Sonic Adventure 3 where you could play as him and all the other cool sonic characters...
Eventually I would get old enough to be given free roam on the internet and through that I would learn to discover this game and its actual reputation through youtube videos much like the ones I referred to earlier. Watching the game crumble under its own weight and seeing EVERYONE just absolutely tear it to pieces gave me a sense of relief that by owning a Wii I unintentionally dodged the bullet that was this game. (though instead I did have to suffer through Secret Rings, so who really won in the end?) I recall a family friend bought an Xbox 360 alongside this game and in the many times trying it at their house yeah it was just as janky and bad as the internet said it was. We would get stuck in that awesome beginners trap of getting owned by the mach speed section in Wave Ocean from hitting the scripted loop-de-loops at a bad angle and getting launched off of them to a game over, then having to restart from the absolute opening of the game. I saw firsthand that wow, this is certainly an unpolished, buggy, unfinished work that should be ridiculed. I couldn't believe this was essentially Sonic Adventure 3...
Eventually I got a PS3, and even more eventually I ended up buying a copy knowing full well what it was, and then I played it up to finishing Sonic and Silvers chapters before tapping out with Shadow. I felt like I had seen enough by that point, and outside of bringing it out for some ironic laughs in multiplayer with friends or playing it at my dentists office while high as fuck getting cavities filled in (don't ask, but yeah), this game remained on my shelf, uncompleted, for the better part of like a decade. The game sucked, after all. Seeing stuff like Project P-06 try and "fix" the game garnered no interest from me. Why would I want to even play a "fixed" version of this? My relationship with this game remained solely in the ironic "this is the bad sonic game haha" mindset and I couldn't believe that there were people that actually thought the game was good. They had to have just been gaslighted by nostalgia, right?
It was only a few weeks ago where the great almighty wheel of games decided it was time for me to stream a playthrough of this online. I figured that being a sonic fan that completing a playthrough of this was inevitable and that at least if I streamed it, it would be entertaining. Despite already owning the game on PS3 I instead bought the (bizarrely relisted for only 5 dollars) xbox 360 version as not only did it serve the ironic bit of buying Sonic 06 digitally in the modern day but also it gave me a clean save and was the most stable version of the game (as little as that actually means anything). As I played through the game, something very peculiar happened. Something that hadn't happened in all the years I've spent all this time rambling about.
I was actually having a lot of fun. And we aren't talking laugh-at-it isn't-this-game-so-bad-amirite-guys fun. Genuine, unadulterated, serious fun.
Maybe my tastes have changed a lot in all this time, maybe I'm going insane, but there was just this earnest sincerity that I felt when playing through this game, that emblematic sincerity that Sonic games have where they sometimes do some really REALLY absurd shit yet play it off with the straight confidence that I can't help but enjoy. Seeing all the sonic characters have their semi-winded anime-ass first-translation-draft dialogues with one another and how they handled this heavy-handed plot riddled with time travel and eldritch-horror summoning was the coolest thing ever. The game may be fucking, but I could still feel the games intent through it all. The game isn't even that fucking, honestly. Most glitches that I had heard the game get lambasted for online were things that I usually had to go out of my way to look for and execute, or things that I likely wouldn't have tried to do otherwise had I not already had the pretense knowledge of "check this out, I'm gonna kick in place on top of this box and you're gonna see some serious shit". The game is certainly unpolished and rushed, but if anything it's actually an absolute miracle that the game is as functional as it is to begin with! There's also tons of different characters to play as, which after having like 15 years of main series 3D games that only have you play as sonic and sometimes a variation of sonic, felt like an absolute breath of fresh air to control characters like Silver, Blaze, Omega, and Rouge again. I couldn't believe that this was essentially Sonic Adventure 3!
As I was enjoying my time with Sonic 06, it really had me thinking about it all. Was this game really as infamously horrendous as everyone has been saying, or had it perhaps been a victim of changing times? It was the first Sonic game designed for HD hardware, so maybe they thought it was a good idea to split the main team in half for Secret Rings as they assumed HD 7th gen gaming would only need as much dev resources as the last generation did, and gravely miscalculated how much more is needed from the jump to HD. 2006 was still the first year of these HD consoles, and a lot of the early titles for 360 and PS3 were also coming to grasps with those same problems regarding either total content or overall polish. Hell, that isn't even a generationally exclusive problem, look at how many games today launch in equal or even worse states as this one. Add that half-bakedness to both the facts that the mid 2000s was peak edgy gamer years culturally as gamers demanded the most photorealistic polished experiences out of their fancy new flat-screen displays, developer work be damned, AND that the modern social-media internet seeds had already been planting and sprouting giving viral videos much more weight, and maybe this game really actually was given a bad hand. There have certainly been a lot of people that wanted to see the Sonic brand crash and burn since its inception, and this game releasing in the state it did at the time it did gave those people the exact ammunition and platform they needed to do exactly that. Maybe the younger players that sing praises of this game aren't gaslit by their own nostalgia, but rather people like me have been gaslit by the myriads of negativity that has been surrounding this game since its inception, then only playing the game afterwards to affirm that already-implanted opinion. I honestly don't know, it's never usually as simple as that and it could go either way. It certainly did do a lot of damage, as after the negativity from this games release bled into other titles released in the same time frame, the brand took a more staunchly conservative approach by delisting "bad" games and scrubbing out any remnants of the 2000s era games from more contemporary works as they focused on more lighthearted and 90's oriented vibes before going full ironic meme mode in the mid 2010s, likely still due to the negativity towards the brand that remained from this game. (luckily that doesn't seem to be as much of the case anymore as both the sonic brand and community have been going back to the core of sincerity and have accepted themselves for what they are as a whole.)
I normally rate things off of some mixture of general recommendability as well as my own personal enjoyment, and while those two attributes usually go hand-in-hand, with this game they are at odds. While I may be crazy enough to have gotten a lot of enjoyment from playing this, I'm not crazy enough to recommend it over most other sonic games and you probably should be aware of what you are getting yourself into should you choose to play it on your own. I really have no idea how to end something like this tbh but I feel like I've said all that I can. There are probably many similar Sonic 06 takes and opinions in the vast endless sea of the internet, but this one is mine. There really is something about this game that makes people write a whole ass manifesto. Can't think of many other games that have that same effect, for better or for worse.
I feel like if you are on the gaming pulse enough to be looking at a website like this, you likely already have at least HEARD of Sonic 06. Pretty much everything that could be said about this game on the internet already has been, it's really quite the overused topic both in the spheres of the sonic fandom and the sphere of bad game critics. Just in the sphere of youtube alone I've seen showcases of the many, MANY bugs and glitches the game contains, reviews of the game that dwell on it for uncharacteristically large amounts of time, personal retrospectives from fans recalling the impact the game has had on the brand as a whole, posthumous optimistic looks at the game dissecting vibes the game manages to retain in spite of its rushed nature, and the more recent phenomena, endearingly nostalgic takes towards the game from those that played it in their formative years. You could say that this game has had just as much of an impact on Sonic's brand as the previous game titled "Sonic The Hedgehog" (of which it has been a longer time between the present day and this games launch than the time between the two "Sonic the Hedgehog" games). It's certainly hard to say anything, let alone anything NOTEWORTHY about this game when everyone already knows what it is and why it is. All I can really contribute to the decades-rotten dead horse conversation is my own personal experiences with the game.
I'm a life-long sonic fan and despite being the correct age to have done so, I didn't grow up with this game. I definitely remember the launch hype cycle for this game, 6-year-old me frequenting the old Sonic Central website and looking at the promotional material for the game. I remember thinking that with the realistic environments and people that the sonic brand must have been taking a more adult turn after Shadow the Hedgehog, and since my family was still rocking the Gamecube as the sole household console, I was fine with sticking to the recently-released (yet equally mature in an incomprehensible sense) Sonic Riders and worrying about the fancy new Sonic game later when I was older. Given that I went on to own a Wii instead of any HD systems and wasn't a part of the greater internet at the time (as I should have been for that age), the release and subsequent car crash that was this games reception entirely eluded me. It wasn't until like, idk 2008/9ish? when I mentioned to a cousin that not much on the PS3 interested me besides "this game called sonic the hedgehog but not like the original one", and got laughed at for it that I realized that there might have been something up with this game, but I never thought much of it. I did always have a fascination with it in a curious way though, and whenever Silver was playable in any spinoff on the Wii, I always only played as him back then because he's from that mysterious sonic game I couldn't play! Imagine a Sonic Adventure 3 where you could play as him and all the other cool sonic characters...
Eventually I would get old enough to be given free roam on the internet and through that I would learn to discover this game and its actual reputation through youtube videos much like the ones I referred to earlier. Watching the game crumble under its own weight and seeing EVERYONE just absolutely tear it to pieces gave me a sense of relief that by owning a Wii I unintentionally dodged the bullet that was this game. (though instead I did have to suffer through Secret Rings, so who really won in the end?) I recall a family friend bought an Xbox 360 alongside this game and in the many times trying it at their house yeah it was just as janky and bad as the internet said it was. We would get stuck in that awesome beginners trap of getting owned by the mach speed section in Wave Ocean from hitting the scripted loop-de-loops at a bad angle and getting launched off of them to a game over, then having to restart from the absolute opening of the game. I saw firsthand that wow, this is certainly an unpolished, buggy, unfinished work that should be ridiculed. I couldn't believe this was essentially Sonic Adventure 3...
Eventually I got a PS3, and even more eventually I ended up buying a copy knowing full well what it was, and then I played it up to finishing Sonic and Silvers chapters before tapping out with Shadow. I felt like I had seen enough by that point, and outside of bringing it out for some ironic laughs in multiplayer with friends or playing it at my dentists office while high as fuck getting cavities filled in (don't ask, but yeah), this game remained on my shelf, uncompleted, for the better part of like a decade. The game sucked, after all. Seeing stuff like Project P-06 try and "fix" the game garnered no interest from me. Why would I want to even play a "fixed" version of this? My relationship with this game remained solely in the ironic "this is the bad sonic game haha" mindset and I couldn't believe that there were people that actually thought the game was good. They had to have just been gaslighted by nostalgia, right?
It was only a few weeks ago where the great almighty wheel of games decided it was time for me to stream a playthrough of this online. I figured that being a sonic fan that completing a playthrough of this was inevitable and that at least if I streamed it, it would be entertaining. Despite already owning the game on PS3 I instead bought the (bizarrely relisted for only 5 dollars) xbox 360 version as not only did it serve the ironic bit of buying Sonic 06 digitally in the modern day but also it gave me a clean save and was the most stable version of the game (as little as that actually means anything). As I played through the game, something very peculiar happened. Something that hadn't happened in all the years I've spent all this time rambling about.
I was actually having a lot of fun. And we aren't talking laugh-at-it isn't-this-game-so-bad-amirite-guys fun. Genuine, unadulterated, serious fun.
Maybe my tastes have changed a lot in all this time, maybe I'm going insane, but there was just this earnest sincerity that I felt when playing through this game, that emblematic sincerity that Sonic games have where they sometimes do some really REALLY absurd shit yet play it off with the straight confidence that I can't help but enjoy. Seeing all the sonic characters have their semi-winded anime-ass first-translation-draft dialogues with one another and how they handled this heavy-handed plot riddled with time travel and eldritch-horror summoning was the coolest thing ever. The game may be fucking, but I could still feel the games intent through it all. The game isn't even that fucking, honestly. Most glitches that I had heard the game get lambasted for online were things that I usually had to go out of my way to look for and execute, or things that I likely wouldn't have tried to do otherwise had I not already had the pretense knowledge of "check this out, I'm gonna kick in place on top of this box and you're gonna see some serious shit". The game is certainly unpolished and rushed, but if anything it's actually an absolute miracle that the game is as functional as it is to begin with! There's also tons of different characters to play as, which after having like 15 years of main series 3D games that only have you play as sonic and sometimes a variation of sonic, felt like an absolute breath of fresh air to control characters like Silver, Blaze, Omega, and Rouge again. I couldn't believe that this was essentially Sonic Adventure 3!
As I was enjoying my time with Sonic 06, it really had me thinking about it all. Was this game really as infamously horrendous as everyone has been saying, or had it perhaps been a victim of changing times? It was the first Sonic game designed for HD hardware, so maybe they thought it was a good idea to split the main team in half for Secret Rings as they assumed HD 7th gen gaming would only need as much dev resources as the last generation did, and gravely miscalculated how much more is needed from the jump to HD. 2006 was still the first year of these HD consoles, and a lot of the early titles for 360 and PS3 were also coming to grasps with those same problems regarding either total content or overall polish. Hell, that isn't even a generationally exclusive problem, look at how many games today launch in equal or even worse states as this one. Add that half-bakedness to both the facts that the mid 2000s was peak edgy gamer years culturally as gamers demanded the most photorealistic polished experiences out of their fancy new flat-screen displays, developer work be damned, AND that the modern social-media internet seeds had already been planting and sprouting giving viral videos much more weight, and maybe this game really actually was given a bad hand. There have certainly been a lot of people that wanted to see the Sonic brand crash and burn since its inception, and this game releasing in the state it did at the time it did gave those people the exact ammunition and platform they needed to do exactly that. Maybe the younger players that sing praises of this game aren't gaslit by their own nostalgia, but rather people like me have been gaslit by the myriads of negativity that has been surrounding this game since its inception, then only playing the game afterwards to affirm that already-implanted opinion. I honestly don't know, it's never usually as simple as that and it could go either way. It certainly did do a lot of damage, as after the negativity from this games release bled into other titles released in the same time frame, the brand took a more staunchly conservative approach by delisting "bad" games and scrubbing out any remnants of the 2000s era games from more contemporary works as they focused on more lighthearted and 90's oriented vibes before going full ironic meme mode in the mid 2010s, likely still due to the negativity towards the brand that remained from this game. (luckily that doesn't seem to be as much of the case anymore as both the sonic brand and community have been going back to the core of sincerity and have accepted themselves for what they are as a whole.)
I normally rate things off of some mixture of general recommendability as well as my own personal enjoyment, and while those two attributes usually go hand-in-hand, with this game they are at odds. While I may be crazy enough to have gotten a lot of enjoyment from playing this, I'm not crazy enough to recommend it over most other sonic games and you probably should be aware of what you are getting yourself into should you choose to play it on your own. I really have no idea how to end something like this tbh but I feel like I've said all that I can. There are probably many similar Sonic 06 takes and opinions in the vast endless sea of the internet, but this one is mine. There really is something about this game that makes people write a whole ass manifesto. Can't think of many other games that have that same effect, for better or for worse.
jtduckman
1 month ago
jesus christ