Joining Sonic Forces—or, Sonic Forces Is Good, Actually (And I’m Just Old)

 

This piece contains story spoilers for the video games Sonic Forces and Sonic Adventure 2.

My first experience with Sonic Forces back in early 2018 was pretty negative. I came away from the game disappointed with its fluffy, fan-fic-y narrative, very short levels, and fiddly game feel. I finished it in two sittings—one a bit longer and one much shorter—and would dip back in occasionally over the next couple of years but never for long. And then, a few days ago (as of this writing), I was in one of those funks I get in from time to time where I want to play something but nothing really satisfies, and I happened to pick out Forces for one of those occasional revisits I mentioned before. I had already played through the story back in 2018, and since Forces is one of those obnoxious modern games that only lets you have one save per console profile and won’t let you replay the story without erasing your progress, I decided to focus on playing through the main game and the very short “Episode Shadow” DLC to get all the collectible red rings hidden in each level. I assumed I would probably bounce off of Forces before accomplishing that goal, but I got hooked instead.

This time, the game captured my interest in a way that it hadn’t before. I got all the red rings, S-ranked basically every level, and went back again for the additional, harder to obtain collectibles (number and moon rings) while also grinding out optional “mission” objectives, all of which led to me unlocking loads of trophies with extremely low completion percentages. The PlayStation Network classifies trophies based on the number of players that have unlocked them, and just finishing Sonic Forces normally is considered “very rare,” while getting all the red rings and accomplishing other goals like beating the game’s unlockable second set of extra stages are considered “ultra rare.” Over a week or so, Forces went from just a naggy blip in my head to being a game I think of very positively, and, obviously, I’d like to spend some time formalizing those thoughts—because it’s fun to do and because, given Forces’ negative-to-mixed reception overall, I think it’s worth offering up my little personal experience in defense of this title.

            The key that let me enjoy the gameplay of Forces actually came from replaying the much older Sonic Unleashed a year or so ago. I really tried to dig into that game, aiming to find the collectibles and complete the optional challenges related to things like time trials and ring-collecting, and it was by settling into the game to accomplish these specific tasks, as opposed to just playing for the story or to earn S ranks, that helped me understand what I had been missing about Sonic gameplay that certainly applies to all the modern titles with the popular “boost” mechanic that finally lets Sonic achieve something like the speed he was always ostensibly supposed to be capable of and is, in retrospect, probably applicable to the earlier games as well: Which is that, ironically enough, it often is not practical or even advantageous to move as fast as the game allows. Keeping the boost button pressed constantly while hitting all the boost pads Sonic Team puts into these games just sends Sonic hurtling right past collectibles and alternative routes/hidden paths and directly into enemies and pits that can become un-reactable, sometimes-deadly hazards at that speed and that take away rings or lives and end up hurting the end-of-level score. I don’t doubt that I’m late to the party with this understanding, and I’m not sure why it took me so long to figure it out.

While Sonic Forces does incorporate new gameplay elements, the fundamental nature of the game could still be described as “more Sonic” to an extent. This is apparent from the HUD in the above screenshot, which retains recognizable elements from both classic and modern Sonic titles. I’ve seen criticism of Forces that emphasizes a lack of creativity or effort from the devs, but I don’t think I agree. Even before I decided I liked the game, it was pretty apparent that it contains a mix of proven ideas (like the boost meter that now defines “modern” Sonic gameplay) and new ones, with a big focus on the addition of player-created avatar characters and the loop of completing tasks, like earning S ranks, to unlock more weapons and cosmetic gear for that character.  

Counter-intuitively, the way to play was to slow down and actually study the levels to spot the collectibles and extra paths. I jumped over boost pads and would backtrack at points to check things out. In doing so, I ended up spending more time playing and replaying levels and actually started to understand their geometry and the arrangement of their hazards, and this practice actually made going faster at a future point in time more fun and less finicky-feeling. The true breakthrough moment for me was an extra time trial in one of Unleashed’s ice stages. These trials remove the game’s usual checkpoints so that the entire level has to be completed in a single attempt without dying once—something that would have seemed completely unappealing to me before that particular playthrough given how I felt about the game and the way that I thought it played, but doing that time trial over and over and over again until I finally got it right represented a moment of understanding on my part. I Got It: the level and how to play Sonic. This is not to say that levels contain absolutely no sense of flow, without design choices that allow a first-timer to react successfully and intuitively at a high rate of speed, but it finally became clear to me that Sonic has a higher stage-specific skill ceiling than I had managed to realize in all the years I had been playing the games.

It was when I applied this mindset to Forces that it clicked for me as well. Like some of my favorite action games—Devil May Cry, Bayonetta, Ninja Gaiden, etc.—Sonic Forces is a very “finishable” game that saves a huge amount of itself (arguably its best self) for subsequent playthroughs. While part of a different genre than the titles I just listed, Forces operates similarly with regard to how finishing the short story is really just the start. The real game begins at that point as you work toward mechanical mastery and take on more difficult challenges locked behind initial completion. You might argue that Forces is better compared with other platforming games like the Mario series, but I still feel the previous connection makes more sense given that I don’t remember finishing an initial playthrough of a Mario game with so little understanding or appreciation. I don’t want to imply that there isn’t depth in other platformers, just that continuing to play Forces felt more mandatory to me. It was only by engaging with its extra challenges that I felt like I understood the game and found it truly likable. Part of me does wonder how many people who dislike Sonic Forces put in time with the game beyond just finishing it. On that note, I want to look at how the different tiers of collectibles work in Sonic Forces and how they, arguably, enhance the game. These can technically be acquired during a single playthrough while also experiencing the story, but I think it’s more likely that most players are going to move on to the next level rather than stop to replay old ones for optional objectives.

The initial five red rings in each stage are scattered all over. Sometimes you can get all of them or multiple of them in a single run, but, more often, they’re placed in positions and along paths that are mutually exclusive. You can’t get them all at once, so you have to replay a given level and familiarize yourself with it as you explore basically all available paths. From there, the next tier of collectibles offers a new challenge. The number rings are hidden in a more localized part of each level, but they have to be collected in descending numerical order, meaning you need to first locate the set somewhere in the level based on your previously-established knowledge of the different paths and then execute some creative movement to collect the rings properly. Touching a number out of sequence removes the rings and forces you to try again by either finishing the level and playing it from the beginning, starting over with “retry” from the menu, or possibly allowing yourself to die to reset at a checkpoint. The next tier—the moon rings—are also generally located in a specific part of a level but now add the additional challenge of a pretty tight time limit. Once you touch one moon ring, you have to get all of them in quick succession to have the set count. These can require an extreme economy of movement to get. Consequently, there’s a clear sequence of escalating trials in Forces, from just finishing a level, to seeing all of it, to then intentionally visiting certain areas and completing specific movement challenges, all of which ask the player to do more than just hold forward on the left stick, press the boost button, and take the most expedient, accessible route through a stage. These collectibles aren’t unique to Forces, but I don’t think that changes the value they bring to the game.

In the process of doing all this technically “extra” stuff, I largely got used to the quirks of Sonic Forces’ movement, which I did not feel was the case after just playing the fairly brief story mode. Continuing with the game also reveals why the levels are as short as they are. Replaying them again and again to see all paths and then to complete the number and moon ring challenges would be significantly more annoying if levels were longer, whereas the bite-sized approach makes it so much easier to justify another attempt. The length is kind of a smart design choice based on the player’s psychology and facilitates thinking along the lines of “Well, it’s only another two minutes…” The game’s “SOS” missions, where you ostensibly help out the animal avatars of other players in previously completed levels, pop up pretty frequently and also allow only a single attempt at completion, essentially removing all checkpoints from the selected stage. Dying even once removes the mission from the map, and you can’t actually play the stage selected to host an “SOS” mission normally while it’s active. This concept and the constraints it brings to gameplay are facilitated by and likely only tolerable because of the short levels. They’re also yet another incentive to revisit each level and to get even more practice with the layouts and the controls.

Pictured above are the three different gameplay styles of Forces: “classic” Sonic who controls largely like the old 2D games and is always played from a side-on perspective, “modern” Sonic who plays like he has for a number of previous 3D games and swaps between 3D and side views, and the player-created avatar that also swaps between the two views and feels a bit like “modern” Sonic with a twist since they have most of his abilities aside from the boost and use the swappable “Wispons” for combat and traversal. Some stages pair “modern” Sonic and the avatar and give the player access to the combined move sets.

That isn’t to say that there are no issues with the design of Sonic Forces. “Modern” Sonic and the player-created avatar don’t control like they’re meant for sustained precision platforming, for example, and the way they both start with too little forward momentum for some jumps while also eventually breaching a sort of critical threshold of speed where maneuverability drops off sharply and jumping will carry too much momentum to accurately land on small platforms, forcing you to jerkily course-correct in the air and probably still either miss the platform or else throw yourself into some hazard or the other, isn’t as much of a problem with enough play but is still present. Sonic Team has also done the usual 3D Sonic game thing of introducing new gameplay elements that they’ve been unable to fully polish, mostly in the form of the game’s “Wispon” weapons your player avatar wields. These have reasonably diverse primary attack and secondary traversal abilities but maybe bring too much diversity in the sense that some may feel a little janky. S ranks are arguably too easy to get as well, and the score boosters you obtain for completing little tasks each day and can easily complete accidentally make it even easier to get that highest letter grade, to the point where it can feel unearned and even annoying if you care about earning it via your own skill. The devs also commit a cardinal (but common) sin of modern gaming in that they have characters talk at you constantly, even during levels. This issue isn’t unique to Forces or Sonic, though, and you can turn the chatter off in the menu if/when you start replaying levels a lot. All that being said, however, I don’t actually want to over-focus on gameplay and basic design in this piece. I want to focus primarily on Forces’ story, though the topics are connected.

Finishing the final level of Forces again on my red ring hunt led me to reconsider the story, both in the moment and more widely. In the moment, it just felt more meaningful to me because the game didn’t whip by so fast when I was hunting down the red rings. Getting them all adds a considerable amount of difficulty to the game—in the most literal, easily understood sense in that some rings were hard to get without also dying in the process, but also in the sense that looking out for the rings and extra paths while intentionally avoiding the “trap” of boost pads and springs that would move me ahead too fast added to the mental challenge of playing the game. It all just required more investment and took more hours than that first playthrough. Forces didn’t end up being radically longer, but I still arrived at the end of the game where the characters are expressing their relief at a hard-fought battle finally won and felt a bit more a part of that moment myself because of my own effort. Maybe some of the disconnect of the story comes from the fact that a lot of people, especially older Sonic fans like myself, probably weren’t going to struggle much to see it through. It felt insubstantial because the gameplay wasn’t backing it up. Tails, Knuckles, and company could talk all they wanted about war and failed ops and the dire nature of the situation, but I wasn’t feeling it because I was blasting through levels in mere minutes and moving on without really struggling, just getting irritated more than anything after flying face-first into bottomless holes since I was just blasting straight ahead. The challenge of the red rings, though, made me seriously re-assess the story since I felt more of a connection to it.

I had initially thought that I might just watch the credits again after beating the final boss of the game, but I ended up watching the last few cutscenes focused on the final confrontations of Sonic Forces, including the actual ending, as well. Watching them, I found myself thinking (and saying) “Maybe I’m just too old?” multiple times because, on this replay, looking at the game again, I found it harder to justify my dislike of Sonic Forces’ narrative. Before, I would have told you that my favorite Sonic game story is the one from Sonic Adventure 2 and maybe 06 (“Oh-Six,” for 2006); however, I’ve recently been revisiting Adventure 2 as an observer watching some streams and, perhaps unsurprisingly, found those rosy impressions challenged. Having also now replayed it myself while working on this piece, I think it’s fair to say that that game’s story does not hold up. As a kid, Sonic Adventure 2 really made an impact on me: newcomer Shadow the Hedgehog’s memories of his friend Maria’s tragic death and then his own ultimate (seeming) sacrifice at the end, in particular. The game plays out across “Hero” and “Dark” stories before the two sides are swept up in a final conflict instigated by what is essentially the computer-bound ghost of Gerald Robotnik, the grandfather of series mainstay antagonist Dr. Robotnik. Gerald’s motivation is deeply personal and even realistic, even if his means of enacting his revenge are pure anime-inspired pulp. He hates the human race because the government shut down his research, killed his granddaughter, Maria, and imprisoned him. The memories of these same injustices motivated Shadow to collect the Sonic series’ signature gemstones, the Chaos Emeralds, which, when all seven were inserted into the laser weapon aboard Gerald’s space colony, would activate this pre-programmed revenge sequence, causing the “ARK” to fall from the sky and impact the earth in a final act of grim retaliation for the violence committed years prior. It was (and on some level still is) a weirdly personal and emotional and grim story to tell via the vehicle of a blue, humanoid hedgehog that runs really fast.

This is the main visual associated with Gerald Robotnik in Sonic Adventure 2—which is to say, giving off The Ring vibes in VHS-ass grainy video. The recording outlines his plan and reasons for revenge briefly and ends just before what seems to be his imminent execution by the military. These design choices are… a lot given that this game is rated E (for “Everyone”) and is full of brightly-colored cartoon characters.

Revisiting that story now, all the beats I described above are still there, but the roughness of the execution is much more apparent. There are some objective flaws with Sonic Adventure 2’s presentation in general and storytelling specifically that threaten to render the soap opera-adjacent stuff less impactful. The audio balance is quite bad, for example, which results in characters being barely audible over the music. Subtitles help with the issue, but there are several cutscenes that don’t have them. Additionally, the English localization is not great. There’s a lot of awkwardness to the translated script and performances, and some of that no doubt comes down to the challenge of trying to get the English equivalents of lines crammed into the space reserved originally for Japanese. The game has intense 2000s Localization Energy overall, where the end-result just doesn’t sound natural. More subjectively, the game feels “under-written” at times, like some cutscenes are just way too brief and go by too fast. The transitions from cutscene to level or level to cutscene or cutscene to cutscene are sometimes kind of tenuous. There is also some very unusual or jerky character movement in cutscenes.

By comparison, Sonic Forces actually has a lot of objectively better elements—basically the inverse of the above. The audio balance is much improved, the translation and performances just sound more natural, and the lip flaps match well enough. Levels are established sensically and logically, and the characters move more convincingly in cutscenes. Sonic Forces has some cheap-looking elements at times (especially the low-quality rocky plain on which the climactic fight between the two armies takes place towards the end) but overall very obviously reaps the benefits of going on two decades’ worth of presentational improvements and a no doubt much better-oiled pipeline for localization. There are weak specific elements of the narrative in Forces—like how Silver the Hedgehog, who’s a time traveler in 06, is just kind of in the game without an explanation (at least without one within the game itself); how Sonic is defeated, presumed dead, revealed to be alive, and freed within a pretty brief period of time; how the critical act of Robotnik actually conquering the earth is reduced to just text on a black screen that carries no emotional weight; how Sonic Adventure antagonist Chaos is shown in cutscenes but never actually encountered in-game...—but I’m still not entirely sure that the balance of quasi-objective good and bad narrative elements in Adventure 2 and in Forces is actually all that different, so what is the deciding factor?

Here’s a fun bit of “cheapness” in Forces. When you’re busting Sonic out of prison, you have to fight a version of Lost World’s Zavok, and this moment at the end of the battle when Sonic delivers a scripted flurry of blows to the boss atop his robot bee lets you get a good look at the other prisoners in the background that you might not have focused on during the battle. It’s hard to tell if these are really 3D models because they mostly look like cardboard cut-outs bobbing smoothly but stiffly up and down. I put “cheapness” in quotation marks because this is an adorable little background detail. It reminds me of the old sports games when the audiences you could spot off-court or whatever were noticeably lower-quality, flat-looking assets designed to divert all resources to the models and details the player would focus on and not just catch a glimpse of in passing most of the time. The impact is the same in Forces: The simple images and movements were enough to create a satisfying-enough impression I glossed over and didn’t feel a need to look at more closely until I was intentionally examining the whole game with a more critical eye.

As I mentioned already, looking at that ending of Forces again and paying closer attention since I was more invested made me think about the graphics and sound and the overall execution, so I was better able to recognize the competence on display. I was also thinking about a bit from composer, game-designer, and YouTube video essayist ThorHighHeels’ great, if underwhelmingly-titled, “is Sonic 06 GOOD tho?” I’m going to transcribe a section of that video here since it has played heavily into my revised thinking about Adventure 2 and Forces:

And, oh man, Mephiles [a principal antagonist of Sonic 2006]: “Yeah, he’s-he’s so evil and grim-dark! Just like my Japanese anime!”... that maybe your parents won’t let you watch yet—bu-but you can play Sonic! And that’s important too. Not that my parents ever gave a shit, but there’s hella kids who grew up in a more conservative environment that had Sonic, particularly the Adventures and-or Oh-Six, as their gateways into cool. . . . Plus, as big as shōnen shows like [Dragon Ball Z] and Naruto had gotten globally at that point, it was still only something for a particular brand of kid at the time and wasn’t always the easiest to come by either, so for a game like this to tap into that so nakedly was not only very ahead of the curb [sic], given that that shit is as mainstream as Marvel at this point, but also very vital to those kids in their developing tastes. Sonic Oh-Six and the hog in general is, dare I say it, a very important stepping stone in the development of modern-day cool. . . . And this game as a cultural touchstone of that era and one many children of that era will have played growing up, who will now be the adults and leaders of the next few waves of cool, will only grow to be more important. . . .

I am, as a general rule, kind of resistant to the argument that I sometimes see made about long-running adult animated comedy The Simpsons no longer being funny to older fans because we’re thinking of the eps we watched as youngsters through rose-colored lenses. I am a believer in the existence of media that retains its value because of high-quality execution that can be appreciated across time (and in the idea that things can actually get worse with enough time and installments), but I do think there may be something to that contentious argument in the case of the Sonic property, or at least in the case of the more story-heavy 3D games. I don’t think Adventure 2 and Forces are all that different in terms of their narratives and their storytelling quality and that the key element in my differing feelings about the two of them is my own perspective.

I first played Adventure 2 on its original hardware when I was still a kid back around its release in 2001, and that kid’s perspective glossed over the rough edges and made the story loom larger in my mind, in large part no doubt because of my inexperience with the world and with media. (Hell, the demo version I played to death before getting my hands on the full game even had the word “hell” in the subtitles of the opening cutscene where Sonic escapes captivity! A delightful little subversive element sneaked into my conservative, Christian childhood.) It definitely altered my kid’s approach to character and game design and to storytelling. Adventure 2’s influence is apparent in my art from the time and in the sorts of game and story ideas I came up with. It hit me at a crucial point in my life—a point very much like the one ThorHighHeels describes, in fact—and so, as suggested in the above quote, probably looms larger for me for that reason. Forces could never stack up because it was competing with not just the actual Adventure 2 but instead with Adventure 2 and all the extratextual baggage I associated with it. It is therefore worth trying to get outside my own head to consider what Forces might look like to a kid who hadn’t yet had that formative Sonic experience.

Sonic Forces opens with a single regular level and then transitions immediately into a cutscene where Sonic tries to save the day but is physically beaten into submission by a gang of villains as Tails tries and fails to understand what mysterious power is making it possible. Then, via simple, unadorned, brutal white text on a somber black screen, we’re told that the world fell easily to Robotnik after that. Forces practically starts with the heroes’ immediate, total defeat, and then the game is talking about Tails kind of losing his mind and Sonic being tortured, and there’s a stage where the heroes try to capture a sort of capital city-type area, but the big push turns into a full-on retreat as the evil Infinite activates the Phantom Ruby device implanted in his chest and turns the cityscape into a twisted gauntlet watched over by massive, illusory masked beasts. You’ve got little rando military animal guys chattering at you via radio about their losses as you manually dodge lasers while running up buildings and watch your avatar slickly auto-dodge attacks from the big monsters using a grappling hook. There’s a flashback at one point in the story where you see your avatar involved in a losing battle against Infinite, where the villain taunts your character and tells them he’ll let them live if they flee screaming. In the second “Episode Shadow” prequel stage, the pre-Phantom Ruby Infinite has a pretty emotional and raw reaction to being easily bested by Shadow. And I could probably go on pointing to other moments from Forces with a similar anime-inspired, over-the-top seriousness that plays a lot better when you’re young and more of a constant raw nerve emotionally and are not quite so cynical and self-aware.

I still don’t think this stuff is as nasty as Gerald’s revenge in Adventure 2 given the more realistic unpleasant elements, like the sense that we just miss witnessing the scientist’s execution at the end of his recording, but I do now think that Forces is probably about as dark and melodramatic and cool and ultimately cringe (in retrospect) as that other game, and there are going to be kids who played this game at the right time like I played Adventure 2 who are going to grow up remembering it for what it really is, which is what it seems to be from that limited and young perspective, rather than what it really is, which is what every 3D Sonic game and all the comics and books and TV series and movies have been to some degree, which is kind of rough around the edges and kind of silly, in no small part because, again, this is a talking, humanoid, blue hedgehog we’re dealing with here.

“Episode Shadow” tells a pretty complicated story considering that it only has three levels, but the impact of its melodrama is definitely hurt by presentational limitations like the overall lack of proper cutscenes. The game has to get by with more white text on a black screen (pictured above) and with conversation “bubbles” over the level-select map (demonstrated below). The corners being cut for (likely) budgetary reasons are just even more apparent than in the main Forces story. If Sonic Adventure 2 has a definitive advantage over Forces, it’s how its story is conveyed throughout using proper cutscenes. Still, if I had played “Episode Shadow” as a kid, I might very well still have been really into the narrative and glossed over the presentational weaknesses.

        At the end of the day, revisiting the stories of Forces and Adventure 2 resulted in about the same feelings on my part. This isn’t to say that I felt nothing, just that both titles clearly would play better to a child. Just to prove that I’m not some hard-hearted monster, I will note here that I recently had a pretty strong emotional reaction to the end of the newest James Bond film, No Time To Die. I don’t actually like the franchise and don’t know that I’ve seen another James Bond movie all the way through, but I watched this one with someone who wanted to see it, and, without spoilers, a climactic final scene really got me in a way it logically shouldn’t have given that lack of personal investment. Nonetheless, the performances and the music and whatnot were able to overcome my awareness of how contrived the drama of that moment actually was and made me wonder, Was I going to cry watching James Bond? So I’m a wuss, but while there were moments in the Sonics that did get some response from me, I wasn’t enthralled or moved against my will. The highly-emotional or dark scenes didn’t beautifully color the rest of the experience like my memories of Sonic Adventure 2. I’m not a kid anymore, and I’ve seen similar beats executed better elsewhere. I can see the cracks in both games because I’m “old,” even more so culturally than just strictly biologically. 

Here’s a truth that maybe Sonic Team but especially at least part of the fanbase might need to internalize and get past: that Sonic is still principally a children’s character and that these are games for children and that there can be no truly also pleasing the adult contingent of the fanbase because we’re just too old, especially where storytelling is concerned, though elements of gameplay like level length could also perhaps do with viewing through that same lens. If we let go of our nostalgia and our subjective perspective and look at the new games from a kid’s viewpoint, I think there’s an appreciation to be had, but there’s no replicating that original experience—and not because the new games are worse but because they haven’t changed, while we have. Critically-acclaimed retro-inspired 2D throwback Sonic Mania not withstanding—I don’t think it’s super relevant to this discussion since it isn’t anywhere near the same beast (er, hog) narratively, and the same could probably be said for the 3D entries with stories that are also lighter on anime-inspired drama, like Sonic Colors and Lost World. Here, I’m thinking mostly of the Sonic 06s of the world, like, perhaps, the upcoming Sonic Frontiers, which looks less obviously edgy upfront but does seem to be cultivating a bit of a somber mood with its realistic empty fields, lonely music, and robot designs that recall 06 a bit in their more straightforwardly mechanical visual menace, so there’s potential there that might build to something Adventure 1- or 2- or Forces-adjacent. To the right kid, at the right moment, I feel, these sorts of high-drama Sonic stories are probably still going to feel like getting away with something and like something mature and exciting. It’s how I felt about Adventure 2 and about the Archie Sonic comics I was reading around that same time period. It all got me right in that sweet spot of time where the edginess spoke to me in a genuine way. It was like Digimon and Power Rangers—all actually pretty tame stuff in truth but that felt just so COOL to me when I was young.

Implied sex in my Sonic comic?! It’s more likely than you think with a writer like Ken Penders at the helm. The video I’ll link just below provides a pretty good quick run-down of his impact on the Archie series, and while it’s probably fair to say that it was negative in the long-term, I stand by what I said earlier about really being into the comic stories when I was younger. Penders wasn’t the only writer, but I associate the comics closely with him and with his convoluted echidna dynasties and “chosen one” plots, which I enjoyed as a kid, along with admittedly tawdry stuff like the love triangles and sometimes inappropriately sexualized designs of some female characters. This stuff made the comics feel mature and cool to me back then. (Here is the video discussing Penders and the comics. And here is an essay that goes into greater detail about the comics and Penders’ role in shaping them.)

        After all that reflection, I think Sonic Forces is really cool. For one thing, it has what may be one of the best-conceived final bosses in a 3D Sonic game—a three-phase battle against a giant robot you fight first as “classic” Sonic, then as the player avatar, and then as a team with your avatar and both Sonics controlled as one. All three gameplay styles from Forces get represented in a single stage to wrap up the game mechanically, which is not entirely dissimilar to Adventure 2’s “Last Story” and its tag-team affair involving all its playable characters. While this game’s ultimate showdown feels a bit weird within the larger context of the series given that you don’t ultimately use Super Sonic against the final boss or, more importantly maybe, get to see your avatar go Super, the last phase especially makes a huge impression. From a visual design perspective, this form of the boss is still a machine but looks almost feral, starting with the way that it basically bursts out of the chest of the larger robot from the first two phases in a manner not entirely unlike the first appearance of the Alien “xenomorph” in film. It’s easy to gloss over it as just another robot from an adult perspective, but I could see kids finding it pretty brutal-looking. Additionally, there are some nice mechanical twists within this last phase of the fight that make it feel satisfyingly climactic. One is how attacking the boss prompts three rather than the usual one targeting reticles to appear as “modern” Sonic, “classic” Sonic, and then the avatar take turns zooming in for a hit. Another is how the game replaces the “double boost” move the avatar and Sonic would sometimes perform at set moments during the game with a new “triple boost” that incorporates all three heroes in a final attack that finishes the boss. These little riffs on established design elements of the game don’t really change how the boss fight plays, but even with the unfortunate absence of Super Sonic (and the theoretical Super Avatar), they contribute to what feels like an appropriately final confrontation to cap off the story. For what it’s worth, this whole fight is better designed than the last boss of Sonic Adventure 2, which has great music and spectacle but is both much simpler mechanically and doesn’t necessarily function as a final test of your skills from the rest of the game since Sonic and Shadow’s Super forms have unique controls.

Going broader, as a kid who grew up with the Western depiction of Sonic as a freedom fighter (or “Freedom Fighter,” in the proper noun sense of the media), Forces looks to me like a delightful gamified version of that narrative as your self-insert character fights with the resistance. It really feels more like it’s their story of overcoming their fear and rising to proper herodom than it is the story of the main Sonic cast, who feel a little under-characterized and samey here. You start out as “the rookie,” but Sonic quickly adopts you as his “partner” or “buddy,” and by the end of the game when he leaves the group once more to go in search of his next adventure, you’re basically presented as a peer. No longer taking orders from the established cast or acting as a second tagging along with Sonic, your character is their own hero. The two lone wolves (er, critters) leave the resistance headquarters one last time and then go their separate ways in dramatic fashion as the sun seems to be either setting or rising.

While it’s easy to look at the whole avatar system and at this character development as intended to serve an audience of older fans who have this long-standing personal connection to Sonic and likely have had a couple “original-character-do-not-steal” ideas lying around for years that they’d be delighted to see incorporated into official Sonic media this way, it’s probably worth getting outside our oldster’s perspective again to think of the kid who gets to be genuinely swept up in this story of resistance against overwhelming odds and to then have their onscreen stand-in be presented as Sonic’s equal and peer as the final beat of the narrative. I think that’s perfect, and as much as audiences who could type and articulate and broadcast their negative thoughts about Forces back in 2017 and since then have made their opinions stick for the time being, I like to think now there’s a silent majority of younger players (the actual audience of the game) who played it and think fondly of it. Sort of like how I now do but without the whole critical bent diluting the purity of the feeling.

I don’t remember my parents having a particular reaction to the presence of the “hell” word in the Sonic Adventure 2 demo, even though I believe my brother and I played it a lot and also managed to get both of our parents to play through it at least once as well.

         As for Forces being ahead of the curve (or at least with it) in some critically meaningful way, there’s this little combined gem from Sonic and Tails I’ll end with that is pretty vaguely phrased but also still kind of resonates with the desperate spirit of the times—as relevant here in the 2020s as it probably was in 2017 at the game’s release, and however far back you want to go, as a revolutionary’s truth: “Alright, guys! It’s time we cleaned up the mess that Eggman left this world in, and I’m not talking about those illusions he dreamed up for us! We need to fix the real world we all live in. . . . A single person cannot restore the entire world. We have to work together and make a diligent effort!” Now, to an adult who “follows” politics or knows the nuances of the real world issues we’re dealing with—the issues that make writing about Sonic, of all things, right now, of all times, feel kind of silly—these observations are just trite, but to a kid maybe this is a radical thought slipped discretely into what may be currently a very narrow, conservative mind space maybe shaped by ignorant or regressive-minded parents: this idea that the world isn’t saved by singular heroes but is changed through effort by a community. Granted, you could just as easily twist this message rightward or leftward, but this isn’t about nuance; it's about the blunt hammer that is Sonic, awkward storytelling and all, hitting you with something that sparks for you when you’re young, inspiring you creatively or perhaps making a particular game stick in your memory, just while maybe also subconsciously making you think anti-fascist color schemes, underground resistance, and smashing robots are also pretty darn cool.