Sonic the Hedgehog (1991)
Nov. 27th, 2024 01:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marchionessofmustacheSo I started a post about this before and don't know if I ever finished it. But this time I'm not gonna post this until I'm done with the whole game 8) Later games I'll break into multiple posts probably, but this game is so simple that it doesn't really warrant multiple posts.
Here's the story synopsis from GHZ:
The mysterious South Island, a veritable treasure trove of gems and ancient ruins, moves in circles along the surface of the ocean. It's said that the island's movement is caused by the power of the six legendary Chaos Emeralds that sleep in its lush hills. The Emeralds distribute energy to all things and are sought for the development of nuclear and laser weapons. However, none have been able to locate the miraculous gems, and their existence remains a legend.
The brilliant scientist Dr. Eggman, having heard the legend of the Chaos Emeralds, establishes a base on South Island to unearth the jewels at any cost. With his high-tech machines, he has managed to transform the hapless animals of the island into robot slaves and is forcing them to tear their home apart in his relentless search for the Emeralds. The evil doctor seeks nothing less than world domination and he is confident that once the Chaos Emeralds are in his grasp, nobody will be able to stand in his way. Not even his long-time nemesis...
Meanwhile, a certain speedy blue hedgehog has rushed to the island after hearing of the turmoil. He is shocked to find all his friends transformed into vicious robots, but there is one hope: Dr. Eggman doesn't realize that the Emeralds exist within a torsion created by the circular movement of the island and hence can't be found on the surface. If this heroic hedgehog can locate the six Emeralds before Eggman, his game will be up. And so the stage is set for another confrontation between Dr. Eggman and his arch enemy: Sonic the Hedgehog!
So that's our story. So all of this takes place on a single island...? There's a lot of different environments on this one little island, then!
The game takes place over the course of six 'Zones,' separated into stages called 'Acts.' Each Zone contains three acts -- two adventure Acts and one boss Act. At the end of each adventure Act, there is a goal, and if you reach that goal carrying 50 or more rings, Sonic will be able to attempt a bonus stage, the "torsions" where the Chaos Emeralds are located.
In this game there are six Chaos Emeralds, but in other games there are a total of 7 (with one other game having 8). I'm guessing that this game's number was simply retconned in the later games, and the one with 8 is non-canon.
There are two endings to the game: a 'bad ending' in which you don't collect six Chaos Emeralds before reaching the final boss, and a 'good ending' in which you do. I don't know what actually happens in these endings -- just that they exist. So we'll find out by the end of this post! Sadly, to obtain an Emerald, you have to win a terribly frustrating minigame, which gets more difficult with each Emerald you find. In addition, you only have 12 chances at the most to win all six Emeralds, which is not a lot since you only get one attempt at the minigame per trigger.
TBH I'm not going to replay the game thousands of times to get all the Emeralds, and I'm playing on the Steam rerelease (as part of Sonic Origins), so I can't just save state to try the minigames again and again. There's technically a way to retry them in Origins through using some kind of special token or something that you can earn by playing the game, but in my experience they're very rare, and collecting enough to actually replay the minigames enough times would take just as long as replaying the game over and over until I finally succeeded in winning the minigame six times in a single playthrough I feel.
In my replay (I got to Labyrinth Zone before, the 4th of 6 zones) I started out and got the Chaos Emerald on Act 1 of Green Hill Zone! I'm trying to take the stages slow, despite the fact that the game is all about "gotta go fast." I feel like the game is actually meant to be played slowly the first time -- there's so many branching paths and such that you wouldn't notice MOST of the Act by just running through. Then once you develop your "perfect" path, you can work on speedrunning it with the fastness feature of the game.
In Act 2, I took the low road first. It was much more dangerous. The stage design is quite interesting in this game, to be honest. The "high road" is more difficult to come across (especially going fast) but full of more rewards and 'easier' sets of enemies and hazards. Generally, though, it's easier to fall and end up in the 'low road,' which is full of hazards and fewer rewards. And then there's paths in-between, as well. I actually got the big ring thing at the end of the Act, but I was moving too quickly and couldn't make it back to it in time to try for the Chaos Emerald :\ Kinda annoying. They should give you more time, or just automatically take you to the bonus stage.
Apparently this Zone took 6 months to develop (the bulk of the entire development cycle) because they were basing the graphics of the zone on then-new 3D CGI. Neat! Also, Sonic was originally intended to be a much lighter blue color, but it made him hard to see against the background of Green Hill Zone, so they changed him to a darker blue in the final product :)
Let's seek more Chaos Emeralds!! Just kidding, I can barely clear the Acts.
Act 1 was a nice little romp, good for going slow. In fact, if you were wanting to go fast, you might be annoyed. There actually weren't many branching paths as far as I could tell, if any at all! I did get hit once, which meant I ended up without enough rings to trigger the bonus stage. Poop.
Act 2 was a little tougher, but another chill Act. I kept getting hit, so even with finding a little secret ring cave, I was only able to amass 38 rings before the ending.
Act 3 took me ... many tries, because I kept falling for the same stupid instant death trap over and over. Trying to rush a little bit gets you in big trouble when you haven't memorized the stages. There were a few annoying design decisions in this Act -- one being that there was a place where you just stood around and didn't know what to do, and then suddenly a spike platform falls down and crushes you. There's no indication of where you're supposed to stand to avoid this or even that this is going to happen, so you're just hopping around and suddenly dead. Then the checkpoints being kinda far apart... that more is a modern gaming spoiling though, being able to reload RIGHT from where you died.
It reminds me of playing Super Mario or Mega Man back in the day and dying and not knowing where the checkpoint was -- you'd say "Where is it going to put me?!" And then if you went back far you were like "ALL THE WAY BACK THERE?!?!?" hahaha. At least in Sonic you get to see the checkpoints.
The boss of Marble Zone was a little boring. The boss of Green Hill Zone was not anything spectacular but it felt 'good' and it felt like you could make your own pattern to fight it. This was pretty much a required strategy that you had to execute, and it was not a very fun one. Just hop once to bump Eggman, then jump across the screen.
Oh, also, Marble Zone was not as visually impressive as Green Hill Zone. You can tell they put extra work into the first Zone.
Act 1 was pretty fun. I had a ton of rings and then lost them all to a mistimed jump... The visuals here are nicer than Marble Zone. So far it was the least interesting-looking of the Zones. I think I found a little shortcut at the end of Act 1 as well. Maybe not so much for speed, but definitely seemed to skip a bit and there was no danger there at all.
Act 2 was fun as well. I think Spring Yard Zone is my favorite of the first three zones so far. We'll see how the boss feels, as Green Hill Zone was pretty good too. Marble Zone wasn't bad, but it was a little slow and felt less "free" than the other Zones. One thing in Spring Yard Zone I didn't like was climbing up the staggered blocks that move up and down. There was no challenge to it and it took forever. Really broke the pacing of the game.
Act 3 had more of the staggered blocks things, and then if you died to the boss (which was pretty easy to die to your first time) you had to do this really slow moving platform thing again before you could face it. Now, there's the classic checkpoint system, and then there's this. Dying to a boss should mean repeating one incredibly slow but easy thing just to face it again. It's basically like having a long elevator ride to a boss and making you do it EVERY TIME you fight it.
There are these random things written in the background... I found one that said "CPU" and one that said "COPE" in blocky letters. I wonder what they mean? Were they maybe in-jokes of the developers? I wonder if there are more that I missed.
The order of Zones seems to be completely random. In fact, the order was originally going to be different but apparently they changed it due to the difficulty of some Zones being too high for as early as they wanted to have them. Like I think Labyrinth Zone was intended to be in the second slot? IDK, I read about this two days ago and forgot already XD
The crystals hanging from the ceiling here are very pretty! While Super Mario games are very cute, Sonic games are very pretty. I've been kinda comparing this to Super Mario World, its rival game, as I've been playing. Not in a super critical way, just kinda noticing things that are different about the two. Another thing I noticed is Sonic has an idle animation and a danger animation when he's standing near the edge of a cliff. I can't even remember the first time Mario got these things. Was the first idle animation not until Super Mario 64?! Well, he might have had like... a simple blinking animation before that in Super Mario World now that I think about it. Maybe.
Anyway, this is where the game starts getting really hard. When I played before I gave up here because I got so frustrated. Let's see if I can turn it around this time...
WOW, Act 1 is already very annoying. There was a part where I wasn't entirely sure what the game wanted from me and I died like 3 times, and it took me all the way back to the beginning of the Act. The checkpoint was just after it -_-; Now that I get it, it's not that bad, but... for a dumdum like me it took too many tries XD
Well, the rest of the first Act went okay. Other than that one spot -- well, even that spot was just me being dumb -- the difficulty has been pretty fair. You just have to really be on your toes and paying close attention to everything.
This is also our first Zone where we encounter the dreaded UNDERWATER. Unlike the friendly water courses in Super Mario Bros. or the fun stages where you get OP jumps in Mega Man, Sonic's first water Zone is a nightmare. You're constantly at risk of drowning and you move SLOOOOOOOOW. It's very anxiety-inducing.
Act 2 was a bit better. Definitely some tricky parts. Why is it called "Labyrinth" Zone when it's fairly straightforward? You know, I was really enjoying the explorable world in the first couple of Acts, and then the game turned pretty linear. Quite strange.
Anyway, I managed to get 100 rings at once! It played a little fanfare, but I'm not sure exactly what it did. I think in the original, it would give you an extra life, but I'm playing the Origins version which has unlimited lives. So it might have given me a Coin (which can be used in the collection to unlock bonuses or buy retries in the bonus stages, etc.)
Um, I got to the part I remember being really hard and causing me to ragequit last time. It's the end of Act 3, when you're chasing Eggman up a tall shaft with spikey things jutting everywhere, and water is constantly rising. I don't really know what was so hard about it before, because I easily cleared it on the first try this time. Yay!
And now this is all new to me! The music here is pretty chill and fun to bob around to.
Act 1 was pretty chill and pretty short. We're back to the branching pathways, though, which is nice. The way I took first made me go fast and then just tossed me into a death pit, so I took a different way the second try and it was lemon squeezy.
Act 2 was also very short and easy. There must be a lot of secrets to uncover by exploring these Acts, but since there's no real benefit to exploring, I may as well just take the easy roads. I'm already too late to get the Chaos Emeralds, so it doesn't matter if I collect a lot of rings or not XD
Aaaaand Act 3 had a few challenging parts, but was overall pretty short and easy. The Eggman fight was particularly easy. So far the boss fights have been a little underwhelming. Once you know the pattern it's pretty simple and just takes a while because you have to hit him so many times...
Very strange that this Zone was the second to last. It seemed super easy. There was one part where I had no idea how to get through without taking damage, but other than that half of it was just run right and the stage played itself.
One thing I don't like about this game is the way it repeats certain patterns. I mean, there's only so much you can do in a game like this, especially one with one action button, but there are so many parts of the game where I feel like "Oh, it's just this again." Like the staggered blocks I whined about in Spring Yard Zone, or these like... descending stair blocks with fireballs shooting at you in Star Light Zone. Graphically, mechanically, etc. they're like the exact same thing repeated. And they tend to take a while. The descending stair things with the fireballs are at least fun, unlike the staggered blocks, though.
I understand this kind of thing was done often in NES games because you could reference the code again for the same pattern to create a longer game with smaller memory constraints. But I don't think that's what they're doing here? I think it's just... copy/paste stage design? Kinda disappointing. Maybe if the descending stairs had fireballs the first time and spikes the second time... something like that... it would be more interesting and not feel like you're just playing the same part of the game again.
OK, I only know there are 6 Zones because I read about the game before starting and had that "spoiled" for me. That means we're in the last Zone. Does that mean Scrap Brain is Eggman's home base? Well, he developed a base on the island for the sake of searching for the Emeralds, so it would be that base, right? Let's go explore~
Act 1... there were NO CHECKPOINTS. There were a lot of difficult things in here, and having to restart was a huge pain. But it was a fun challenge to marathon through everything.
Act 2 was a blast. It was quite challenging, with no big repeated stuff, and again no checkpoints, so I was nervous the whole time. The zippy elevator thingies made you feel like you were diving deeper and deeper into the secret base. Also, when I finished Act 2, The screen scrolled a little bit and there's more to do...? I don't know if I'm on Act 3 or what...?
Ah, OK, it was just a little animation of Eggman trapping Sonic. And now I'm in some completely different-looking place for Act 3! We've fallen into some kind of underground dungeon?! Don't know, but this is pretty cool. The feeling of actually progressing through areas in this Zone has been great. I really feel like I dove deeper into a base and then was thrown into the depths of... Egghell.
OK, it turns out it was just recolored Labyrinth Zone, with some hangy vines. Kinda disappointing, and there was a lot of scary underwater crap too. There was one part I had to redo like at least 5 times. But now I'm in "Final Zone" and I popped up where Eggman knocked me into this mess to begin with.
This is just a short little area and a boss fight. The boss was not hard to figure out, but quite tough to execute. In all, a satisfying final boss. But not as epic as Super Mario World's final boss fight. That was amazing. But probably about as good as Super Mario Bros. 3, with more of a Mega Man feel to it.
Though if Eggman wanted to crush Sonic in that room, why not deploy all four pistons and once? Instead of just two, and even be standing inside of one! Of course you'll get trounced that way, you egg!!
In the end, I got a little credits roll with some video of Sonic running through the previous Zones, including him doing a couple neat techniques to reach places I didn't know how to reach. Then we get a screen of Eggman juggling the five Emeralds we didn't collect that says "TRY AGAIN."
For the Origins version, we get a special anime outro which shows Sonic having collected all six Emeralds (YAY, I did, guys!) and he touches one and gets a vision of them flying off to an island and being joined by one more that appears from behind kinda.
The good ending, I looked it up, is mostly the same. In the beginning before the credits roll, Sonic releases the six Emeralds, which causes flowers to bloom everywhere in Green Hill Zone. And then at the end, instead of Eggman juggling the Emeralds, he is jumping up and down on the word "END." That's it :)
The little animation of Sonic releasing the Emeralds is nice, though I don't know if it's reward enough for having gone through the difficulty of clearing the game and gathering all the Emeralds. In the original version of the game, there were limited lives, no continues, and no way to retry the minigames. So just clearing the game on its own was tough. But to actually get the proper ending...??? WOW
Ah, and it should be known that the final boss fight ended with Eggman escaping, whether or not you collected all of the Emeralds. So they were planning for more from the beginning?! It's interesting to note that Bowser actually falls to his doom in every Super Mario game that I can think of. But somehow he comes back...? Though I think I remember reading once in an article that all Super Mario games are actually Mario and friends acting out a performance for the player to watch, and they're not ACTUALLY fighting and stuff. Or something like that. IDK lol. Mario lore isn't really as interesting as Sonic lore.
But yeah, that's our little adventure through the South Island incident. I'm not entirely sure what happened to the Emeralds at the end -- they turned into flowers when Sonic released them? Then the anime scene showed them flying away to ... somewhere? And Eggman is still out there somewhere...
From the bit I read on the Sonic Wiki, this game is also the first game in the "Death Egg Saga," which I guess is one of the overarching story plots in the franchise. I know some later games revolve around another plot point called the "Chaos Incident," and then it seems like each game after that has a more self-contained story...?
But yeah, I finally finished Sonic the Hedgehog for the first time! I can't imagine doing this as a kid with limited lives and no continues. I wonder how I would feel about gaming if I had grown up with this instead of Super Mario Bros. games...? I definitely would have wanted to clear the game AND get all the Chaos Emeralds, so I would have spent a LOT of time on the game. Maybe I would have learned to go fast XD I never actually played the first game as a kid -- I had friends with Genesis...es... who let me play Sonic 2, but no one owned the original...?
I'd say I enjoyed my time with Sonic the Hedgehog. And I might actually play it again at some point. With the Origins version and updated DLC, it's possible to play the game as Tails, Knuckles, and Amy (even though it makes no sense because I'm pretty sure Sonic hasn't even met any of them yet).
It's a much shorter and simpler game than Super Mario World, which was a much more grandiose and epic adventure with tons more content and variety to the gameplay. It even was a smaller game than Super Mario Bros. 3, which was released a few years earlier.
But it does have its own positives, like the large, open Acts with various paths to traverse. You don't see that in Super Mario and Mega Man games except very rarely. And it's definitely NOT something that could have been done on the NES hardware at all, despite all my comparisons to NES games. The game being simplified to a single action button + directional buttons actually is a plus for me. It makes the game more approachable, and it's quite impressive what all they did with just one button. Super Mario World, on the other hand, used three different action buttons but it doesn't feel like you have THAT much more control or option in that game compared to this one...? IDK.
In the end, Sonic the Hedgehog makes for a good (albeit small) game. The repay value is massive for how small the game is, which is great for a game of its era. The more arcadey-action style feel is nice and refreshing, and it feels more like a game for gaming's sake than something meant to be some kind of massive adventure. I would definitely put it on par with Mega Man in quality, though it's not my style as much as Mega Man is. It really is a nice set of the stage for the series, I feel. Coming off of it, I definitely feel like I want to play more, whether it's a new game or just replaying this one. If I didn't hate the minigame so much, I would replay to get the six Emeralds right away. But I can't put up with the minigame enough to warrant a million replays HOPING I don't fail in 6 of MAYBE 12 chances I get to try.
Next up is Sonic the Hedgehog 2, which is often praised as the 'best one,' though I hear a lot of similar praise for Sonic 3 & Knuckles, too. Sonic CD is posed as the next game on the Origins collection, but Sonic 2 was released first, so we're going to go with that one.
Here's the story synopsis from GHZ:
The mysterious South Island, a veritable treasure trove of gems and ancient ruins, moves in circles along the surface of the ocean. It's said that the island's movement is caused by the power of the six legendary Chaos Emeralds that sleep in its lush hills. The Emeralds distribute energy to all things and are sought for the development of nuclear and laser weapons. However, none have been able to locate the miraculous gems, and their existence remains a legend.
The brilliant scientist Dr. Eggman, having heard the legend of the Chaos Emeralds, establishes a base on South Island to unearth the jewels at any cost. With his high-tech machines, he has managed to transform the hapless animals of the island into robot slaves and is forcing them to tear their home apart in his relentless search for the Emeralds. The evil doctor seeks nothing less than world domination and he is confident that once the Chaos Emeralds are in his grasp, nobody will be able to stand in his way. Not even his long-time nemesis...
Meanwhile, a certain speedy blue hedgehog has rushed to the island after hearing of the turmoil. He is shocked to find all his friends transformed into vicious robots, but there is one hope: Dr. Eggman doesn't realize that the Emeralds exist within a torsion created by the circular movement of the island and hence can't be found on the surface. If this heroic hedgehog can locate the six Emeralds before Eggman, his game will be up. And so the stage is set for another confrontation between Dr. Eggman and his arch enemy: Sonic the Hedgehog!
So that's our story. So all of this takes place on a single island...? There's a lot of different environments on this one little island, then!
The game takes place over the course of six 'Zones,' separated into stages called 'Acts.' Each Zone contains three acts -- two adventure Acts and one boss Act. At the end of each adventure Act, there is a goal, and if you reach that goal carrying 50 or more rings, Sonic will be able to attempt a bonus stage, the "torsions" where the Chaos Emeralds are located.
In this game there are six Chaos Emeralds, but in other games there are a total of 7 (with one other game having 8). I'm guessing that this game's number was simply retconned in the later games, and the one with 8 is non-canon.
There are two endings to the game: a 'bad ending' in which you don't collect six Chaos Emeralds before reaching the final boss, and a 'good ending' in which you do. I don't know what actually happens in these endings -- just that they exist. So we'll find out by the end of this post! Sadly, to obtain an Emerald, you have to win a terribly frustrating minigame, which gets more difficult with each Emerald you find. In addition, you only have 12 chances at the most to win all six Emeralds, which is not a lot since you only get one attempt at the minigame per trigger.
TBH I'm not going to replay the game thousands of times to get all the Emeralds, and I'm playing on the Steam rerelease (as part of Sonic Origins), so I can't just save state to try the minigames again and again. There's technically a way to retry them in Origins through using some kind of special token or something that you can earn by playing the game, but in my experience they're very rare, and collecting enough to actually replay the minigames enough times would take just as long as replaying the game over and over until I finally succeeded in winning the minigame six times in a single playthrough I feel.
Green Hill Zone
In my replay (I got to Labyrinth Zone before, the 4th of 6 zones) I started out and got the Chaos Emerald on Act 1 of Green Hill Zone! I'm trying to take the stages slow, despite the fact that the game is all about "gotta go fast." I feel like the game is actually meant to be played slowly the first time -- there's so many branching paths and such that you wouldn't notice MOST of the Act by just running through. Then once you develop your "perfect" path, you can work on speedrunning it with the fastness feature of the game.
In Act 2, I took the low road first. It was much more dangerous. The stage design is quite interesting in this game, to be honest. The "high road" is more difficult to come across (especially going fast) but full of more rewards and 'easier' sets of enemies and hazards. Generally, though, it's easier to fall and end up in the 'low road,' which is full of hazards and fewer rewards. And then there's paths in-between, as well. I actually got the big ring thing at the end of the Act, but I was moving too quickly and couldn't make it back to it in time to try for the Chaos Emerald :\ Kinda annoying. They should give you more time, or just automatically take you to the bonus stage.
Apparently this Zone took 6 months to develop (the bulk of the entire development cycle) because they were basing the graphics of the zone on then-new 3D CGI. Neat! Also, Sonic was originally intended to be a much lighter blue color, but it made him hard to see against the background of Green Hill Zone, so they changed him to a darker blue in the final product :)
Marble Zone
Let's seek more Chaos Emeralds!! Just kidding, I can barely clear the Acts.
Act 1 was a nice little romp, good for going slow. In fact, if you were wanting to go fast, you might be annoyed. There actually weren't many branching paths as far as I could tell, if any at all! I did get hit once, which meant I ended up without enough rings to trigger the bonus stage. Poop.
Act 2 was a little tougher, but another chill Act. I kept getting hit, so even with finding a little secret ring cave, I was only able to amass 38 rings before the ending.
Act 3 took me ... many tries, because I kept falling for the same stupid instant death trap over and over. Trying to rush a little bit gets you in big trouble when you haven't memorized the stages. There were a few annoying design decisions in this Act -- one being that there was a place where you just stood around and didn't know what to do, and then suddenly a spike platform falls down and crushes you. There's no indication of where you're supposed to stand to avoid this or even that this is going to happen, so you're just hopping around and suddenly dead. Then the checkpoints being kinda far apart... that more is a modern gaming spoiling though, being able to reload RIGHT from where you died.
It reminds me of playing Super Mario or Mega Man back in the day and dying and not knowing where the checkpoint was -- you'd say "Where is it going to put me?!" And then if you went back far you were like "ALL THE WAY BACK THERE?!?!?" hahaha. At least in Sonic you get to see the checkpoints.
The boss of Marble Zone was a little boring. The boss of Green Hill Zone was not anything spectacular but it felt 'good' and it felt like you could make your own pattern to fight it. This was pretty much a required strategy that you had to execute, and it was not a very fun one. Just hop once to bump Eggman, then jump across the screen.
Oh, also, Marble Zone was not as visually impressive as Green Hill Zone. You can tell they put extra work into the first Zone.
Spring Yard Zone
Act 1 was pretty fun. I had a ton of rings and then lost them all to a mistimed jump... The visuals here are nicer than Marble Zone. So far it was the least interesting-looking of the Zones. I think I found a little shortcut at the end of Act 1 as well. Maybe not so much for speed, but definitely seemed to skip a bit and there was no danger there at all.
Act 2 was fun as well. I think Spring Yard Zone is my favorite of the first three zones so far. We'll see how the boss feels, as Green Hill Zone was pretty good too. Marble Zone wasn't bad, but it was a little slow and felt less "free" than the other Zones. One thing in Spring Yard Zone I didn't like was climbing up the staggered blocks that move up and down. There was no challenge to it and it took forever. Really broke the pacing of the game.
Act 3 had more of the staggered blocks things, and then if you died to the boss (which was pretty easy to die to your first time) you had to do this really slow moving platform thing again before you could face it. Now, there's the classic checkpoint system, and then there's this. Dying to a boss should mean repeating one incredibly slow but easy thing just to face it again. It's basically like having a long elevator ride to a boss and making you do it EVERY TIME you fight it.
There are these random things written in the background... I found one that said "CPU" and one that said "COPE" in blocky letters. I wonder what they mean? Were they maybe in-jokes of the developers? I wonder if there are more that I missed.
The order of Zones seems to be completely random. In fact, the order was originally going to be different but apparently they changed it due to the difficulty of some Zones being too high for as early as they wanted to have them. Like I think Labyrinth Zone was intended to be in the second slot? IDK, I read about this two days ago and forgot already XD
Labyrinth Zone
The crystals hanging from the ceiling here are very pretty! While Super Mario games are very cute, Sonic games are very pretty. I've been kinda comparing this to Super Mario World, its rival game, as I've been playing. Not in a super critical way, just kinda noticing things that are different about the two. Another thing I noticed is Sonic has an idle animation and a danger animation when he's standing near the edge of a cliff. I can't even remember the first time Mario got these things. Was the first idle animation not until Super Mario 64?! Well, he might have had like... a simple blinking animation before that in Super Mario World now that I think about it. Maybe.
Anyway, this is where the game starts getting really hard. When I played before I gave up here because I got so frustrated. Let's see if I can turn it around this time...
WOW, Act 1 is already very annoying. There was a part where I wasn't entirely sure what the game wanted from me and I died like 3 times, and it took me all the way back to the beginning of the Act. The checkpoint was just after it -_-; Now that I get it, it's not that bad, but... for a dumdum like me it took too many tries XD
Well, the rest of the first Act went okay. Other than that one spot -- well, even that spot was just me being dumb -- the difficulty has been pretty fair. You just have to really be on your toes and paying close attention to everything.
This is also our first Zone where we encounter the dreaded UNDERWATER. Unlike the friendly water courses in Super Mario Bros. or the fun stages where you get OP jumps in Mega Man, Sonic's first water Zone is a nightmare. You're constantly at risk of drowning and you move SLOOOOOOOOW. It's very anxiety-inducing.
Act 2 was a bit better. Definitely some tricky parts. Why is it called "Labyrinth" Zone when it's fairly straightforward? You know, I was really enjoying the explorable world in the first couple of Acts, and then the game turned pretty linear. Quite strange.
Anyway, I managed to get 100 rings at once! It played a little fanfare, but I'm not sure exactly what it did. I think in the original, it would give you an extra life, but I'm playing the Origins version which has unlimited lives. So it might have given me a Coin (which can be used in the collection to unlock bonuses or buy retries in the bonus stages, etc.)
Um, I got to the part I remember being really hard and causing me to ragequit last time. It's the end of Act 3, when you're chasing Eggman up a tall shaft with spikey things jutting everywhere, and water is constantly rising. I don't really know what was so hard about it before, because I easily cleared it on the first try this time. Yay!
Star Light Zone
And now this is all new to me! The music here is pretty chill and fun to bob around to.
Act 1 was pretty chill and pretty short. We're back to the branching pathways, though, which is nice. The way I took first made me go fast and then just tossed me into a death pit, so I took a different way the second try and it was lemon squeezy.
Act 2 was also very short and easy. There must be a lot of secrets to uncover by exploring these Acts, but since there's no real benefit to exploring, I may as well just take the easy roads. I'm already too late to get the Chaos Emeralds, so it doesn't matter if I collect a lot of rings or not XD
Aaaaand Act 3 had a few challenging parts, but was overall pretty short and easy. The Eggman fight was particularly easy. So far the boss fights have been a little underwhelming. Once you know the pattern it's pretty simple and just takes a while because you have to hit him so many times...
Very strange that this Zone was the second to last. It seemed super easy. There was one part where I had no idea how to get through without taking damage, but other than that half of it was just run right and the stage played itself.
One thing I don't like about this game is the way it repeats certain patterns. I mean, there's only so much you can do in a game like this, especially one with one action button, but there are so many parts of the game where I feel like "Oh, it's just this again." Like the staggered blocks I whined about in Spring Yard Zone, or these like... descending stair blocks with fireballs shooting at you in Star Light Zone. Graphically, mechanically, etc. they're like the exact same thing repeated. And they tend to take a while. The descending stair things with the fireballs are at least fun, unlike the staggered blocks, though.
I understand this kind of thing was done often in NES games because you could reference the code again for the same pattern to create a longer game with smaller memory constraints. But I don't think that's what they're doing here? I think it's just... copy/paste stage design? Kinda disappointing. Maybe if the descending stairs had fireballs the first time and spikes the second time... something like that... it would be more interesting and not feel like you're just playing the same part of the game again.
Scrap Brain Zone
OK, I only know there are 6 Zones because I read about the game before starting and had that "spoiled" for me. That means we're in the last Zone. Does that mean Scrap Brain is Eggman's home base? Well, he developed a base on the island for the sake of searching for the Emeralds, so it would be that base, right? Let's go explore~
Act 1... there were NO CHECKPOINTS. There were a lot of difficult things in here, and having to restart was a huge pain. But it was a fun challenge to marathon through everything.
Act 2 was a blast. It was quite challenging, with no big repeated stuff, and again no checkpoints, so I was nervous the whole time. The zippy elevator thingies made you feel like you were diving deeper and deeper into the secret base. Also, when I finished Act 2, The screen scrolled a little bit and there's more to do...? I don't know if I'm on Act 3 or what...?
Ah, OK, it was just a little animation of Eggman trapping Sonic. And now I'm in some completely different-looking place for Act 3! We've fallen into some kind of underground dungeon?! Don't know, but this is pretty cool. The feeling of actually progressing through areas in this Zone has been great. I really feel like I dove deeper into a base and then was thrown into the depths of... Egghell.
OK, it turns out it was just recolored Labyrinth Zone, with some hangy vines. Kinda disappointing, and there was a lot of scary underwater crap too. There was one part I had to redo like at least 5 times. But now I'm in "Final Zone" and I popped up where Eggman knocked me into this mess to begin with.
Final Zone
This is just a short little area and a boss fight. The boss was not hard to figure out, but quite tough to execute. In all, a satisfying final boss. But not as epic as Super Mario World's final boss fight. That was amazing. But probably about as good as Super Mario Bros. 3, with more of a Mega Man feel to it.
Though if Eggman wanted to crush Sonic in that room, why not deploy all four pistons and once? Instead of just two, and even be standing inside of one! Of course you'll get trounced that way, you egg!!
Ending
In the end, I got a little credits roll with some video of Sonic running through the previous Zones, including him doing a couple neat techniques to reach places I didn't know how to reach. Then we get a screen of Eggman juggling the five Emeralds we didn't collect that says "TRY AGAIN."
For the Origins version, we get a special anime outro which shows Sonic having collected all six Emeralds (YAY, I did, guys!) and he touches one and gets a vision of them flying off to an island and being joined by one more that appears from behind kinda.
The good ending, I looked it up, is mostly the same. In the beginning before the credits roll, Sonic releases the six Emeralds, which causes flowers to bloom everywhere in Green Hill Zone. And then at the end, instead of Eggman juggling the Emeralds, he is jumping up and down on the word "END." That's it :)
The little animation of Sonic releasing the Emeralds is nice, though I don't know if it's reward enough for having gone through the difficulty of clearing the game and gathering all the Emeralds. In the original version of the game, there were limited lives, no continues, and no way to retry the minigames. So just clearing the game on its own was tough. But to actually get the proper ending...??? WOW
Ah, and it should be known that the final boss fight ended with Eggman escaping, whether or not you collected all of the Emeralds. So they were planning for more from the beginning?! It's interesting to note that Bowser actually falls to his doom in every Super Mario game that I can think of. But somehow he comes back...? Though I think I remember reading once in an article that all Super Mario games are actually Mario and friends acting out a performance for the player to watch, and they're not ACTUALLY fighting and stuff. Or something like that. IDK lol. Mario lore isn't really as interesting as Sonic lore.
But yeah, that's our little adventure through the South Island incident. I'm not entirely sure what happened to the Emeralds at the end -- they turned into flowers when Sonic released them? Then the anime scene showed them flying away to ... somewhere? And Eggman is still out there somewhere...
From the bit I read on the Sonic Wiki, this game is also the first game in the "Death Egg Saga," which I guess is one of the overarching story plots in the franchise. I know some later games revolve around another plot point called the "Chaos Incident," and then it seems like each game after that has a more self-contained story...?
Conclusion
But yeah, I finally finished Sonic the Hedgehog for the first time! I can't imagine doing this as a kid with limited lives and no continues. I wonder how I would feel about gaming if I had grown up with this instead of Super Mario Bros. games...? I definitely would have wanted to clear the game AND get all the Chaos Emeralds, so I would have spent a LOT of time on the game. Maybe I would have learned to go fast XD I never actually played the first game as a kid -- I had friends with Genesis...es... who let me play Sonic 2, but no one owned the original...?
I'd say I enjoyed my time with Sonic the Hedgehog. And I might actually play it again at some point. With the Origins version and updated DLC, it's possible to play the game as Tails, Knuckles, and Amy (even though it makes no sense because I'm pretty sure Sonic hasn't even met any of them yet).
It's a much shorter and simpler game than Super Mario World, which was a much more grandiose and epic adventure with tons more content and variety to the gameplay. It even was a smaller game than Super Mario Bros. 3, which was released a few years earlier.
But it does have its own positives, like the large, open Acts with various paths to traverse. You don't see that in Super Mario and Mega Man games except very rarely. And it's definitely NOT something that could have been done on the NES hardware at all, despite all my comparisons to NES games. The game being simplified to a single action button + directional buttons actually is a plus for me. It makes the game more approachable, and it's quite impressive what all they did with just one button. Super Mario World, on the other hand, used three different action buttons but it doesn't feel like you have THAT much more control or option in that game compared to this one...? IDK.
In the end, Sonic the Hedgehog makes for a good (albeit small) game. The repay value is massive for how small the game is, which is great for a game of its era. The more arcadey-action style feel is nice and refreshing, and it feels more like a game for gaming's sake than something meant to be some kind of massive adventure. I would definitely put it on par with Mega Man in quality, though it's not my style as much as Mega Man is. It really is a nice set of the stage for the series, I feel. Coming off of it, I definitely feel like I want to play more, whether it's a new game or just replaying this one. If I didn't hate the minigame so much, I would replay to get the six Emeralds right away. But I can't put up with the minigame enough to warrant a million replays HOPING I don't fail in 6 of MAYBE 12 chances I get to try.
Next up is Sonic the Hedgehog 2, which is often praised as the 'best one,' though I hear a lot of similar praise for Sonic 3 & Knuckles, too. Sonic CD is posed as the next game on the Origins collection, but Sonic 2 was released first, so we're going to go with that one.
