Alright, time to finally talk about this game. Following up on the expansive era of Heroes and the Adventure titles, Sega produced a special game for the series’ fifteenth anniversary, which used the strange reboot naming formula of just having the original game’s title again. Due to its release date, this game would go on to be known colloquially as Sonic 06. It would also mark Sonic’s first mainline appearance on a Microsoft console, seeing as he hadn’t had his own console to live on since Adventure 2 and was kind of shopping around to see where he was comfortable. The game was also supposed to be ported to the Wii, but there were so many development problems with that that the port became a totally different game (but we’ll talk about Secret Rings later). Either way, 06 was to be bigger and better than anything they’d done before, acting as the spiritual successor to the Adventure games in such a way that it was referred to as Adventure 3 during parts of its development cycle.

06 would feature three story modes, each starring a different hedgehog and two of his allies in short bursts of playability. The first two of these were the expected characters: Sonic and Shadow were each accompanied by their buddies from Heroes. The third story belonged to new character Silver, who would be teaming up with Amy, as well as Blaze from the Rush titles, marking her transformation into a series regular (albeit with an increasingly convoluted backstory in an effort to tie her to Silver). Following up on their ambitious nature, Sega even tried to put a fascinating story together, forgoing the usual hero/villain stories in favor of three heroic factions at odds with each other as the result of the villain’s machinations in a time travel plot. From an advertising standpoint, this was shaping up to be the best thing that could have happened to the franchise.

But you all know how that turned out.

I won’t spend too long harping on the game’s issues, because they’ve been discussed to death, but the game sucked. It had one of the worst physics engines ever seen in gaming, the development was rushed in excruciating fashion, it was very possible to get caught in an infinite loop that forced you to reboot the game (particularly during Silver’s boss fights), there were more loading screens than you could count and they would interrupt characters in cutscenes mid-sentence, the story was barely coherent, the speed stages were clearly never playtested, and many of the side characters were underbaked while possessing required abilities the game didn’t tell you how to use. Also everyone hated Silver and Elise, the token human princess who is horrifically out of place and absolutely commits bestiality as a plot point. The game was a commercial failure that singlehandedly shifted public perception of the Sonic franchise from “the second biggest and most important game series ever” to “laughable garbage.” Heroes was rough around the edges sure, and the first game has always been crusty and questionably designed, but this was the first time the series just completely failed to deliver, and it did so brutally. Not to defend it, but it also suffered hard from the timing, as being the first mainline game on the Xbox consoles meant this was many people’s first experience with the franchise, and the fact that the new console generation bumped up the price of games right around when this came out, making its mediocrity hit even harder. Sonic 06 immediately earned its reputation as one of the worst games ever.

And that kills me, because this could have been an excellent title. You have a very interesting core here, between the story beats and the variety of gameplay styles, and this should have advanced the state of the franchise in a meaningful fashion. It’s very solid thematically. Sonic’s character is very well established by now, and he gets to teach his philosophy (as defined in the same theme song he’s been using for the past several games) to Elise, who stands to grow as a person from it. Shadow finally lets go of his edgy nonsense, really trusts his old friends from Heroes, and gets to play guide to Silver, who is so lost as a result of his circumstances that he accidentally causes the apocalypse and loses Blaze, which gets paralleled in Amy abandoning her usual shtick of chasing Sonic to help somebody else get over their obsession with him. Rouge is unapologetically a hero for once, and Omega gets to become a more complete character and more than a robot. Frankly, this is doing tons of work for everyone not named Knuckles or Tails. And it all somehow ends up sucking anyway. Maybe it was sloppy writing, maybe it was the fact that Silver had no arc in spite of being positioned as the emotional core of the story, maybe it was because nobody could take any of this nonsense seriously in a game where a bunch of anthropomorphic animals try to stop Maybe-The-Actual-Devil from destroying a human-centric world while incorporating a creepy Sonic x HumanGirl romance directly into the plot. The game has so many ideas that it proceeds to fail to use in any real capacity, because absolutely no one can agree on what kind of story you can actually tell with the Sonic cast while ensuring that people take it seriously.

Oh and of course there being a ton of focus on the team-ups only for six of the playable characters to be reduced to 1-2 level gimmicks you never use for anything meaningful even though they’ve all been full playable characters in the past really didn’t help things. Nor did creating Silver when you could absolutely write this story without him, just subbing Blaze in as the third hero since she’s an actually well-liked character who was seemingly custom made to be the hero of this story based on her appearance in the Rush games.

As a result of this game’s abysmal critical performance, Sonic found itself in a strange place, which would come to be defined as the Sonic Cycle.

Not that one, that one’s just a funny image that we’ll be coming back to later.

Following the series’ jump to 3D, we experienced a good game (Adventure), into an improvement on that formula (Adventure 2), before ditching that formula entirely to try something funky (Heroes) into a maligned spinoff (Shadow) before crashing into an awful title (06). As we’ll see in the future, the next step in the cycle is to experience a good game (or in this case, the foundation of a good new formula) in Unleashed (‘s daytime stages). The cycle repeats into the games that follow. We’ll talk on these titles more in the future, but you can follow that exact cycle with the next set of games released. We experience a good game (Colors), into an improvement on that formula (Generations), before ditching that formula entirely to try something funky (Lost World) into a maligned spinoff (Sonic Boom) before crashing into an awful title (Forces). And then they gave us a good game with a new formula in Frontiers, because this franchise really is running through the same loop-de-loop Sonic runs through in the first level of every game. And fans have come to expect it, as seen in the image above.

This all started with 06, because while we could have had a small slump in the series with Sonic Heroes and Shadow the Hedgehog, this marked the critical point where the franchise ground to a halt in a way that it never recovered from. Sega listened to many, many of the complaints surrounding the series at this time, and you can see the changes resulting from it in every future title (disregarding party/racing spinoffs where the normal rules don’t apply, such as Mario & Sonic at the Olympics). Following this game, we haven’t seen Sonic’s friends In any major playable roles outside of the what-if spinoff Sonic Boom. They became utterly terrified of using those characters in any sort of playable form again, and began cutting down on the appearances of characters from after the Genesis era (ie. Sonic, Tails, Amy, Knuckles, Robotnik, and Metal Sonic), for fear that they were what fans disliked. The variety of gameplay styles in the series would also decrease dramatically as a result, with no games being willing to risk anything outside of Sonic gameplay plus maybe one gimmick, and the more experimental Storybook Series that spawned off this game’s failed Wii port being preemptively shut down just as people were starting to like it. The ambition Sega had shown in every game leading up to this, which had defined both them and the series as a whole, was gone.

The series stands in a rocky place today, with a chance at redemption through Mania and Frontiers, but it also has the shadow of the Sonic Cycle hanging directly over it, and if the cycle holds, then the series will start to crash and burn again in the next game or two. Is it fair to blame all of this on one rushed game? No. Sonic 06 was a disaster, but it was also the result of questionable business practices. Sega jumped to new hardware, split the team in an attempt to develop a port for completely incomparable hardware, and rushed the game out for the fifteenth anniversary. As some modern fan projects are showing, there’s actually a semi-competent game in 06 if you fix the physics engine and remove the loading screen problem. It still isn’t a great game with the questionable story, the weird level design, and the under baked expanded cast, but there was something of value under it all. Taking everything about 06 into consideration, it really should have been Adventure 3, and I think it might have had a chance to raise the series to new heights by introducing Sonic and friends to a new audience if it had just been given the time it needed to bake. Unfortunately, that isn’t what happened, and it instead has the legacy of temporarily crashing one of gaming’s biggest franchises. While the series has ultimately recovered, I sometimes question if this is improvements within the series, or if it’s just a case of Sonic already being too big to truly fail by the time this released. I’ve gone into depth about the sheer creativity and innovation the franchise produced already, and Sega did an A+ job of making the blue hedgehog into one of the most marketable characters on the planet, who still had TV shows airing and spinoff titles releasing alongside 06.

And that’s Sonic 06. I’m sure you were expecting a more in-depth analysis of everything wrong with the game, but let’s not pretend everyone who’s ever talked about it hasn’t done that job well enough already. 06 left the series in a questionable place. They wanted to continue experimenting with gameplay styles, but they were afraid of any character that wasn’t Sonic now. Plus there was that port that became a completely different title nearing release…