Review: Sonic 3 & Knuckles

Sonic 3 & Knuckles is often touted as the best game in the Sonic Franchise. While I can respect the opinions of other people and I know taste is subjective, I can’t say this is my favourite. Actually, for the longest time I kind of hated this game.

But I guess after playing it again and again over the years, I’ve warmed up to it. So being the masochist I am, I’ve decided to do a deep dive, and really see what makes this game tick.

Disclaimer, I’m not going to throw around the phrase “speed, platforming and exploration”. I think people need to remember that Shaymay is one guy who has one interpretation and I take issue with calling it the core elements of Sonic. Sonic was actually born from the experience Yuji Naka had speedrunning world 1-1 in Super Mario as he had to get to the warp pipes as fast as possible in order to catch up to the last place he progressed. If I had to break that down into a set of buzzwords, I could say the core elements are flow, multi-layered staging and tight mechanics that are conducive to finding the fastest route from start to end.

But it’s reductionist to boil the design of an entire game to three vague interlinking concepts. And whether you agree more with my interpretation or Shaymay’s comes down to personal choice and what you look out for in a Sonic game. I’m always looking for a fun level to try get a better time in. Which is why the classic trilogy doesn’t always appeal to my sensibilities. But don’t take this as me badmouthing Shaymay or anything, I actually think he’s done one of the best and most in-depth analyses on Sonic to date, and his Sonic Spitball series is an important landmark for the discussion of all things Sonic.

I just think he’s a little biased, is all.

Anyway, while I respect playing a game faithful to its release state, I’m also not a masochist. I’ll be using the Sonic 3 Complete Edition hack to illustrate most of my points, and I’ll be playing it through Fusion; Unfortunately Sega’s Unity Launcher causes immense slow-down and the simple launcher doesn’t accommodate for workshop content.

Onto the critique.

For those who aren’t in the know, Sonic 3 & Knuckles is a physics based action platformer which rewards skilful play with a higher score and a faster completion time. Gather the  game’s seven collectables and you unlock a super form which can shave even more time off a run, although only after collecting 50 rings. There are three characters to play as, each with their own abilities which can make traversal or enemy encounters easier. Levels are  grouped into stages, which are divided by acts. Mini-bosses occur at the end of each act whilst boss encounters with the antagonist occur at the end of each stage.

It’s a solid game. However, here are the mechanics which, in my opinion, hold it back.

When you reach 9:59, you get a time over, which immediately subtracts a life. While this isn’t any real inconvenience in most stages, a lot of the later ones are designed to waste your time. A time over is a frustrating punishment for careful play, which is a crucial process for new players or players unfamiliar with the design of any given level. The game is basically saying, sorry, not fast enough, fuck you, try again, while also making stages so large and winding that they can genuinely take a full ten minutes to traverse. It’s archaic artificial difficulty. The timer also counts upwards instead of down, so unless you already know about the 9:59 rule, it’s going to hit you out of nowhere when it happens. Later games would remove this entirely, and I’m thankful. This brings me to the lack of conveyance to the player of certain game mechanics. The rules of blue sphere come to mind, but there’s also the old ceiling run that’s a beginner’s trap; To go right when Sonic is running on the ceiling, you must hold left. Which might sound obvious to you watching footage now, but it’s super unintuitive. This probably won’t bother you since you instinctively keep holding the direction you were pressing if you’re running up a slope, it does mean in those rare moments where you don’t hold any direction or hold the  wrong direction, you might not know why you’re losing speed.

The window between when Sonic can collect rings after taking a hit can really mess you up. For about half of Sonic’s invincibility frames, he’s actually not allowed to collect any rings. This is to prevent you from instantly recovering rings by falling into them, but often it’s just led to me standing around waiting for the game to decide, okay, cool, you’re allowed to get hitpoints back. Some places, the rings won’t even collide with the floor. The final boss is one case where your one ring will just fall into the abyss. I wish the rules for this were kept more consistent.

Finally, the insta-shield. For the longest time I didn’t even know what it did, but for the sake of thoroughness, the insta-shield is a mid-air ability for Sonic that extends the radius of his spinjump, gives him a frame or two of invincibility, however, the ability to bounce small projectiles away from him was only added in the rom hack, which is why I could never get as much use out of it before. Why the insta shield couldn’t reflect projectiles in the the original release is beyond me. Without that ability, it is objectively worse than flight or gliding. It’s not that I don’t like the Insta-Shield, I just never got the same mileage as I did with the ability to fly or glide. I’d trade it in for a Drop Dash in a heartbeat. I also appreciate the inclusion of the Super Peel Out in the hack, but considering it uses the same control scheme as the combination for flying with Sonic and Tails, I can understand why it was excluded. Still, if I’m playing as Sonic by himself, there’s no reason to not have the Super Peel Out, and it’s not like it’s any harder to program than a Spindash.

Angel Island Zone;

With all that out of the way, I’ll start at the start. Angel Island Zone.

Angel Island Zone is a pretty little stage, but overall it’s not even close to my favourite opening level. The main gimmicks here are the crumbling floors, the zip lines, the water hazards and there’s this tree Sonic runs up about a third of the way through that looks really awkward since the facing part of the tree is made transparent. It looks more like he’s caught in a whirlwind than as if he’s scaling the tree .

Aesthetically it has a lot of bright greens, cool blues, and earthy browns, and then the level changes into sickly yellows and aggressive oranges. The parallax scrolling has a ton of layers which makes the stage feel really alive.

The music is a fun little island jam that makes liberal use of marimbas and flutes, with a bouncy bass line on top of a Caribbean beat. Seriously, I just want to round up my friends and form a drum circle on the beach while this song plays. There’s a little bit of tonal dissonance when everything is on fire and there’s this lively jam playing but I’ll forgive it because this song is so, freaking, good.

As for the layout, the stage is mostly here to give you a quick tutorial on how to use elemental shields. Angel Island pretty tough as far as openers go, and while it’s not exactly controller snapping difficulty, Angel Island certainly won’t baby you. Maybe Green Hill or Emerald Hill would be more lenient but Angel Island isn’t going to fuck around, there’s water, there’s spikes, there’s spike ball shooting flowers, there’s rhino shaped goombas, spiked logs, platforms crumble and there’s a mini-boss after the first act. Luckily there aren’t any bottomless pits but the bar is set, and it only gets tougher from here. The big rings aren’t hidden too obscurely and with the barest amount of exploration you’re likely to nab at least one.

And as much as I like how active the platforming is, it’s kind of a shame the level never really has a  moment to take you for a ride. As overused as Green Hill is, it nails having this super fun tunnel that launches you into the air into a mess of rings, which culminates in this mini-challenge to stay in the air by bouncing off badniks. There’s really no equivalent in Angel Island because of how methodic it is about getting you from point A to B. You can’t underestimate the value of spectacle in a Sonic game, after all, part of why Sonic is so damn cool is because he doesn’t just run and jump, he’s running faster and jumping higher than any of his contemporaries.

Act 2 ends on a running segment where you gotta hold right to not die, and for all the shit people give Sonic Adventure, it surprises me that no one ever calls out this moment in Sonic 3. So this is me, calling it out. At least it’s brief but it definitely lacks the spectacle of later automated sections. After that we enter a bossfight bookended by two bottomless pits that is pretty much a waiting game if you don’t have the fire or lightning shield. And there’s going to be a reccuring theme of bosses who turn into a real pain when you don’t have the corresponding elemental shield. But Pop, bam, done, and with that we’re off to Hydrocity.

Hydrocity:

Hydrocity is a fan favourite level that I like the music and aesthetics of, but because of Sonic’s particular brand of underwater physics, this level always ends up being more of a nightmare than it has any right to be.

The background is layered with dark and foreboding blues that pan downwards into these gigantic pillars, but travel further up and you’ll see the purple brickwork of a coliseum. You know, I’ve never really figured out like what Hydrocity is supposed to be. Like, is it a flooded ancient city? A water treatment plant? An aqueduct? I don’t know but I like it. The music here is also all about the funk. The bass line is dominant, grabbing your attention with slaps and pops. The  keys open with an in your face slide before chiming in with a secondary line. The drums sound like they come right off a mid 90s MC Hammer track. I like to imagine a bustling night out in the city to Hydrocity’s theme, and were it set to a casino themed level, the song actually wouldn’t sound out of place. But the playful and trepidatious  tune fits the stage and bringing just the right amount of levity to what is otherwise a fucking nightmare for a hedgehog who can’t swim and is very easily impaled on spikes.

The layout is of made up of a top layer filled generously with loops and ramps. There are genuinely fun moments where Sonic reaches the speed necessary to run on water.  Contrasting that, the bottom half is water logged and just much slower. And, oh boy, do I mean much slower. Sonic feels like he’s walking through tar underwater, and his jump becomes floatier but with no extra gain in height. As far as water levels  go, Hydrocity is actually one of the better ones, and luckily the water sections don’t last too long if you know what you’re doing.

Still, the drowning alarm gives me nightmares. Those few repeating notes trigger a deep anxiety within my soul.

Act 1 houses most of the water segments but is generous enough with bubble shield capsules to make you feel like you aren’t in too much of a jam. The further you go, the more you’re funnelled to the top, until you’re dropped back down for an easy mini-boss. The Insta-shield is pretty useful for a lot of bosses designed with these projectile barriers but man, if they don’t get stale fast. Like, there are a lot of bosses that boil down to some metal thing with projectiles floating around in a circle. Is… Is that what you like? Is that what you want? Is this what makes Sonic 3 & Knuckles the gift from the gods on high?

Act 2 starts underwater and then gives you a precarious climb as a wall ominously closes in. This section gave me a lot of trouble as a kid, and if you have the original Sonic 3 layout, the level designer wanted to give you  an extra special “fuck you” in the form of this inconveniently placed spring. This section involves a lot of stopping and starting and I’m sad there isn’t an equivalent in Mania, because climbing this tower with the Drop Dash would probably make this section a helluva lot more fun.

After that it’s fans, spinny barrels and water slides. It’s a fun time, no doubt. While Angel Island isn’t my favourite opener, Hydrocity might just be my favourite sophomore level. It doesn’t have pipes of chemical plant nor does it have too many instances of bullshit crushing deaths.

The act 2 boss is Eggman dropping bombs and using a whirlpool to turn you into Sonic niblits, although the bombs might just induct you into the NASA space program first. You can stand on the  column of water for a platform, which is some videogame logic if I’ve ever seen it.

But with that, we’re at Marble Garden.

Marble Garden Zone:

Marble Garden Zone is a particular brand of fresh hell. Sharp slopes, spikes, enemies that are disguised as spikes, fuck-off big spike balls on chains, more fucking spikes, the most inconsequential mini-boss of all time. Also crushing blocks.

The background is a multi-layered landscape of purple mountains, blue skies and fresh green trees. Look closely and you can also see a couple pillars poking from the trees. The Aztec ruins vibe this stage gives of is really fun, but that’s about the most fun thing about it. The foreground houses what I assume are peach trees, and the patchy brickwork of pale grey, earthy orange and muted purple really drive home that South American feel the level has.

The music sounds little like the theme of every 90s sitcom ever, and but the keys eventually devolve into what sounds like a harmonic minor scale, bringing an interesting little twist. Although the keys also get a little cheeky with this descending slide that’s the musical equivalent of a wink. The bass line is what’s driving the song here though, and I kind of just wanna loiter on some street corner with a backwards cap and a boom box.

Act 1 is mostly consists of sharp slopes, the spinning windmill platforms that usually hover atop mud, spikes, crumbling floors and the introduction to the spin top. I actually don’t mind this little guy but I do wish changing direction felt a bit more natural. It’s fun to land it and let the level just take you for a ride and I appreciate that you don’t lose any rings when you’re hit while using it. Also I hope you don’t get sick of this tower section because it’s repeated like four times. You end on the first form of this little drill bot and I honestly forget about him until Lava Reef Zone. Poor guy just wants to impress Eggman Senpai.

Act 2 is more of the same but now with these grasshopper enemies that can show up out of nowhere. They aren’t much of a threat unless you’re going super slow but they’re there. You also raise platforms by revving up these… Uh… Blue cranky things? Like, what are these? They’re just sort of laying around, like, who besides Sonic is raising platforms like this? Either way, they’re fun and if you stand on top of one and spin dash it launches you up into the air. There’s also these face status which spit arrows at you, and in true Zelda fashion, if you smash their glowing weak point the game  lets you progress. The end is a race against the sinking ceilings and pillars, and then Tails assists you in shoving your spiny ass right into Eggman’s cockpit.

In all honesty I don’t actually think it’s that awful a stage but Marble Garden Zone is definitely one of the less enjoyable ones. Maybe it’s just the curse of a stage made of Marble. There are also a few instances of less than subtle signposting but hey, I didn’t get lost so they had one job, and they did it.

What good little boys.

Carnival Night Zone:

But ugh. Carnival Night Zone. Man, how bare bones is this carnival music? Sure, it has a sample from Michael Jackson’s Jam, but other than that piece of trivia, Carnival Night Zone is the least interesting stage in the game, and it’s not helped by some annoying stage gimmicks. Luckily I live in a post-dial-up world so I know how to deal with the barrels. Sorry, 80s babies, I guess I can’t sympathise with the frustration this stage must have brought you, but I can hate it for other reasons, right?

Carnival Night Zone is the obligatory “fun” zone of the game. Each Sonic Game has one, and while the quality of these levels don’t say much about their respective games, Carnival Night Zone just sucks when compared to its contemporaries. Springyard Zone might not have conveyed the pinball and slots fusion as well as Casino Night Zone, but the music in both are much more interesting. Carnival Night Zone has one of those songs that try really, really to hide how much they’re just another iteration of Entry of the Gladiators by Czech composer Julius Fucik. Also Madagascar has now got me saying Afro Circus every time this song plays and which makes me loath this stage just that extra bit. There’s a monotonous wub of a baseline repeating the same note ad naseum, and the song sounds like it’s always starting a music phrase but never relieving the tension. It’s like talking to someone who never finishes a sentence but always starts a new but anyway the music is really I don’t  enjoy it.

The backdrop is a neon pastel city beneath a dark and looming mountain range. In the foreground we have all the carnival staples, from red and white circus tent stripes to flags and neon lights, framed with a healthy amount of mustard yellow. Overall I actually don’t hate the visual design of the stage. It’s bright, it’s colourful, and the lights turning off does a lot to make the stage look more treacherous.

However, the stage layout has a couple fun gimmicks. I like the balloons. Maybe it’s just the love I have for rooftop run with the confetti and the balloons and the festivities but I freaking love these balloons that pop and give you some height mid-air. It’s so fun to just pop them like if this was all the stage was about, I wouldn’t give it so much shit. But because it’s the “fun” stage, we got bumpers. 

So, so many bumpers.

So Act 1 has you navigating Barrels bumpers, balloons and spikes. There’s the introduction of the candy cane tube as well as a throwback to Sonic 1’s final stage in these wheels. Otherwise we also have canons, and yellow platforms that cause you to float and these floating platforms that you fill with air by standing on which then ascend when you jump off, making them the world’s most unnecessary elevators. As for enemies you have these bats that couldn’t pose less of a threat if they tried and these clam enemies that double up as bounce pads. It ends with a miniboss that’s almost interesting due to the fact that you can’t hurt it and you have to expose its weak point to this spike platform thing, but that’s about all the praise I can give it.

Act 2 adds water but shows off the fun auxiliary function of balloons, which produce air when popped. I think there would have been so much more fun to be had in a stage where you pop balloons for air bubbles , but instead it’s bumpers, barrels and bullshit. Knuckles shows up halfway through and for some reason there’s an invisible wall that prevents you from cleaning his clock then and there. You know, people praise these little transition cutscenes but they have the weird effect of making Sonic look like a dopey idiot who just takes Knuckles’ bullshit. I mean, how much conflict here would be resolved if I just bopped this jackass on the head now and saved myself the trouble of doing it later? Anyway, Knuckles turns off the power which changes fuckall about the stage mechanically, and after just a minute you turn it back on so I never really got the point. Next up is a worthless Eggman bossfight, but I suppose I’d have timed over were it any longer.

But with that, we’re at the end of the zone, and off to Ice Cap.

Ice Cap Zone:

Ice cap starts off with Sonic snowboarding down a mountainside with what was originally meant to be a piece of metal ripped from Flying Battery Zone. And while the order doesn’t really matter much, for all the shit people give Adventure, Adventure 2 and ’06, those games at least let you control the snowboarding section.

The music here is a weird one. It shares a lot musical assets with Hard Times by the Jetzons, which I believe is on account of Brad Buxer producing both, although Hard Times went unreleased until 2008 so it was likely that Buxer just didn’t want to let anything go to waste. The key difference between the songs being the melody, which carried by the vocals in Hard Times is replaced by this whiny synth which I think is supposed to mimic an organ. The way the bassline gallops as this snare drum clacks every so often, combined with the constant pounding of a kick drum creates a lot of forward momentum in the song. There’s marimbas that chime in for the chorus which fill up the sound space considerably, making the verses actually feel kind of empty.

As for layout, you snowboard into Act 1, then you have to use your momentum to swing up the level. The only enemies are are penguins and orbinauts, but considering the crushing pillars and spikes, the level is already a dangerous time. Around the halfway point is your first taste of the vertical loop, and it always surprised me how seamless these are. The springs here are out to get you though, and are a real pain to navigate. Eventually you emerge from the ice caves to a mini-boss using ice shields but a bit of patience goes a long way here.

Act 2 has a lot more loops and ramps which makes the stage feel a lot more exciting than the toned down theme would suggest, and then you’re introduced to these trampolines, which are far more interesting than the usual springs if you ask me. It’s not all that long an act, but the boss here is just a pain. Blasts of cold ait come out in a random pattern and  on the seventh hit, the platform breaks off so Eggman can be an extra pain.

I don’t have much to say about the background here. It is snow, and ice. Once you’re inside there are at least these deep purple stalactites and glowing crystal balls but otherwise there’s not much more to say. The foreground  sometimes has these colourful diamonds but otherwise it’s more snow and ice. Kind of like that’s the level’s theme or something. Once you escape the cave you’re at least greeted with a body of water at night, and act 1 ends at the dawn of a new day. There are the eponymous ice caps now brightly lit and then that’s what we see all the way to Launch Base Zone.

Launch Base Zone:

Launch Base Zone is kind of meh. It’s got all these set-pieces where you aren’t in control along with some genuinely cheap enemy and spike placement. But you can grind infinite lives here, so I did just that. Oh, what’s the game gonna do, time over me and give me 98 lives instead? That’s sure gonna teach me. Many moments of exciting gameplay later, I actually started Launch Base Zone.

The music is this one minute loop of a sitcom intro bass line attached to bit-crushed samples of someone telling me to go, but not where, so you can take your patronising shit and find the door. There are elements of lounge and strings softly hum along in the background. A lot of that 90s radicality comes through and while that’s an artefact of its time, the charm has by this point worn out.

The stage has you race through a yellow brick base with the Death Egg looming in the distance. The background is a little static but it gets the message across so I’m not going to complain on about it.

Act 1  has these magnetic cylinder, boost… Things. Fire spitting chickens, alarms that spawn birds, snails, frogs and more orbinauts. I’m fucking sick of orbinauts by now man, don’t you have any new tricks up your sleeve? There are also these lasers that can go fuck themselves but they make the stage feel perilous so I won’t complain too much. There are a couple tubes that loop and redirect you and I think these are fun but otherwise I don’t really got much nice to say about this one. Another mini-boss circled by objects that eventually create an opening you exploit. I get the fun here is seeing how fast you can take them down but when there’s no penalty for just waiting a couple extra cycles then I gotta say, this is just uninteresting boss design. Like, this shit isn’t hard, it’s tedious.

Act 2 is the  same shit but now there’s water. Real original, hope that didn’t take too much time to come up with. The background at least moves a little now and there are these interesting mountains in the background, and they’re a bright and earthy orange. Otherwise this has to be the least innovative stage in the game.

Then the boss rush starts. I was worried it might get challenging but the moment I lost an elemental shield and had to use the insta-shield, the first boss went down like a chump. Knuckles shows up for a chuckle and he can go fuckle himself, and then we’re off to the last two bosses of the first half of the game. First up is Eggman having a giggle while he makes me wait for an opening and ineffectually scrolls up and down the screen. After that formality, it’s the main event, and oh boy.

Big Arms is a fucking awesome boss. 

The music is a jam, the fight is just challenging enough and I’m engaged again. It’s a shame this was cut from the final version of Sonic 3 & Knuckles and I’m glad the Rom Hack adds it back in, although it means dying makes you refight the two worthless gits before Big Arms. Couldn’t there be a checkpoint in between?  Whatever, the power of save states kind of negate s the bullshit but I wanna have my cake and eat it too dammit.

And with that, we start the Sonic & Knuckles half of the game

Mushroom Hill Zone:

Mushroom Hill starts off with Knuckles all but grabbing you by the dick and dragging you to the Master Emerald, and then the stage actually starts.

And I can’t hate this stage. It’s mushroom hill, contender for best opening stage of all time. The music is a fun time, with the bass having this fat tone that I just associate with bouncing off mushrooms. The keys are playing the harmonies, and there’s this cheeky little climb before the chorus. What I’m interpreting as a sax here carries the melody and oh boy, is it a catchy one.

The stage actually undergoes three pallet swaps here and that’s just impressively dynamic. This was the opener of Sonic and Knuckles so it had to show you all the money shots, and it delivers. The background is also a densely layered forest of trees below a clear blue sky, the foreground is filled with spore particles and lush grass and this weird dirt and brick hybrid. It’s all good stuff, I have no complaints here.

Act 1 is really interactable, with bouncy mushrooms and loops and this swing set and these vines that grab you and these vines that unfurl for a platform and this pole that launches you up and down and springs and this climby thing and this weighted see-saw. Like this level is packed and wants you to play with it. Only four enemies here, these mostly inconsequential mosquitoes, these mushroom chucking dudes, the chickens and  these dragonflies who can only be destroyed from the top or bottom. It’s a good time, with an easy, bouncy mini-boss, and it’s a decent palette cleanser after Launch Base.

Act 2 starts with Knuckles being a cheeky chucklefuck but there’s more of the same, but now the music is a little more  in your face, and then we end on something I can’t remember being done before, a running bossfight. These definitely aren’t my favourite but credit where credit is due, it’s an impressive looking bossfight by Genesis standards, hell, it still looks good today. Pop the capsule and there we go, off to Flying Battery.

Flying Battery Zone:

The best thing about Flying Battery is the music. It’s bouncy, it’s bass-y, it’s a fun time. I could just listen to this music all goddamn day. I’d give more thoughts on it than that but then you might just be tricked into thinking I know what I’m talking about. Still, this is a jam.

Aesthetically though, ehh… It’s alright. It’s a good looking level with pale greens, dark blues, oranges and greys. It’s the inside of an airship and outside there’s a clear blue sky. The platforms all have interesting designs though, like these floating balls. Like, what are these even? The walls have furnaces but what do you need all these furnaces for man? There’s no way this isn’t a fire hazard so I hope you have insurance Eggman because you’re going to get sued for reckless endangerment.

Act 1 is inoffensive. We got monkey bars, flamethrowers, moving platforms, these mice dudes, wire tubes, speed boosters, moving circle platforms, poles, mines, rockets, these rhino fuckers,  spike balls and magnet platforms and spring capsules. It’s dangerous but if you’re patient then your biggest worries are the rhino projectiles and being crushed. There are several sections outside the ship that help in making the zone feel a little more like a real airship you’re storming. Then comes a miniboss who loses a game of “why are you hitting yourself” every time.

Act 2 changes up the music a bit but adds this high pitched screech that I pretty much hate. We’re  now introduced to slow descending crusher blocks and nothing gets my engine going like waiting in a Sonic Game. There’s this pole-arm that I like and I wish we got to see more of these but, hey, this game has nothing if not feature bloat. The act ends on this laser that Eggman accidentally blows his ship up with, and then we get an escape sequence. Then Eggman comes back in this armed mech that swings around the platform, although it’s more of a nuisance than anything else.

Sandopolis Zone:

Sandopolis Zone is everything wrong with Sonic 3 & Knuckles. Block pushing, crusher blocks, slow sand streams, slow abseiling, music so uninspired it makes Sonic Boom sound like a Grammy nominee and Act 2 is an extra pain in my ass but we’ll get there in a moment.

The background is a sandy landscape at sundown, with a Pyramid thrown in just in case you couldn’t figure out you were in Egypt. Tiles are made of brickwork with hieroglyphics and the whole stage is a bright yellow. I do like the warping effect everything has to simulate  heat waves but other than that, meh. This zone sucks.

Act 1 is the stage that will make you hate Sonic’s jumping sound effect, while asking you to wait. Just… Wait. Wait for blocks, wait to finish abseiling, wait for  the sand to finish carrying you, wait for these jerk-offs to get out of your way, hell, as cool as the double loop is, eventually it’s just waiting for Sonic to stop showing off and get on with the fucking stage. It ends on a boss where you wait for him to put himself back together so you can knock his ass into the sand behind him.

Act 2 is somehow worse. Now you have to deal with these ghost jerkoffs on top of waiting for more shit. And if you don’t hate the sand rising sound effect by the end then you’re more patient than me. The looping sand slides are a pain in my ass and you know what? This stage sucks. When people call Sonic 3 & Knuckles the best Sonic game of all time, I assume they mean some fictional version where this stage just does not exist. So here’s the three nice things I have to say about it; These scorpion enemies are an enjoyable challenge, I don’t hate the rising sand escape sequence and I like that the background changes from hieroglyphic bricks to  wooden support beams.

The end boss is… Familiar.  I actually don’t hate it, but that might be more because it’s the one part of Sonic Adventure 2 I don’t hate. And at least there’s an end to this nightmare and we’re back to having fun in Lava Reef Zone.

Lave Reef Zone:

Lava Reef Zone is this beautiful cave with green caverns and warm earthy rocks, with the eponymous lava giving you an occasionally scare. There are a lot of pipes that redirect the lava flow and the colour pallet here is just a soothing reprieve from the obnoxious yellow of Sandopolis.

The music is also good. Still carrying island themes, but sounding more like an 80s power ballad.

Act 1 is a fun little stage with switches to push and these exploding rock fellas who look so freaking pumped to blow up right in your face. There are the reefer pipes and look how chill they are man. We got these elevators you spindash on to ascend or descend. The miniboss foreshadows the final boss here, along with these film reel tentacles that are really less of a threat than they seem. Also unlike the final boss, you can’t just spindash in the corner here.

Act 2 sees the lava in the stage cooling down and crystalizing. I love this man, I think the theming here is just so on point. It’s too bad that this stage just has a couple unfortunate caveats. An auto-scroller in a Sonic game? I guess even the bad parts of Forces are sourced from somewhere. But you don’t get extra points for being shit first, so take the L, classic fanboys.

The act starts off with a hazard that will knock you on your ass if you aren’t paying attention, but once you adjust the stage actually doesn’t throw too much at you. I particularly like this spinning ladder that launches you, and these sin wave spike balls. I also love this ramp here, but the elevator about 25% through can go eat a dick. Knuckles also shows up to harass you one last time but knowing how much fun I’m going to have introducing your chin to the pavement, have your last laugh you red little chucklefuck. I like the death egg looming in the background here, it’s a fun touch. Like, you saw it crash in the midway cutscene/Sonic & Knuckles intro, now you’re there, where it crashed. After autoscrolling your way down, you finally  fight Eggman, and I use the word “fight” very loosely because you really just wait. Wait for him to stop pelting his own machine with spike balls. This is also one of those fights made an extra pain in the ass by not having the corresponding elemental shield.

And finally, revenge. Eat shit, Knuckles.

Sky Sanctuary Zone:

You know, it always weirded me out that they brought Sky Sanctuary back for Generations. Is this the stage you all remember from this game? I can bet there were some people who never even saw Sky Sanctuary. I thought Hydrocity was the fan favourite. Can’t complain since Generations did a fantastic job and the fact is that I do actually like Sky Sanctuary but hey, I have my nits I can pick. Anyway, Knuckles, now having some sense knocked into his thick fucking skull has a little lie down while the death egg ascends in the background. You really get a sense of how high up the stage is with all the layers of cloud behind you. Sky Sanctuary isn’t actually all that hard, but that might work in its favour. Metal Sonic greets us for a bit of a boss rush and the stage is finished after just one act. It’s a fun time and the music is pretty relaxed for a point in the game with so much stakes. Like, Eggman is throwing all he has left at you. The guy really, really wants you dead and like, here you are having a casual stroll through the clouds. So you tear Metal Sonic a new one after an actually impressive column scene we enter Death Egg Zone.

Death Egg Zone:

And fuck Death Egg zone. The music is this happy space park theme that invokes feel good sci-fi and adventure movies like Back To The Future but the stage is a goddamn nightmare. This playthrough also happens to be the first time I’ve managed to get through without a time over, but it’s not like the light bridges weren’t trying their best to waste my time. It’s a deceptively fun looking stage but between anti-gravity, tubes and these see-saw platforms I don’t think I can call this stage anything other than a miserable time. This stage actually came back in Sonic Advance 2 and I think I prefer that one, although the Advance series might get their own special episode.

Act 1 actually isn’t too terrible. One or two parts where you just gotta wait for the  platforms to do their thing, but it’s mostly inoffensive. The only real time I had a lot of frustration was this bounce chamber that can just take so much time to get through. There’s a light bridge you can skip with a well-timed jump, but that means missing a checkpoint. The miniboss is also inoffensive, but there could be better telegraphing on when I can and can’t hit him.

Act 2 is when the bullshit cranks into overdrive. Reversing gravity isn’t a clever trick in a platformer; it just makes control less intuitive. Extra fuck you to the level designer for this elevator, and also for placing no rings by this checkpoint. I lost so many lives to this, although the solution ended up being deceptively simple. I do however love the view of earth from here. The miniboss is also deceptively easy. At first you might think you can only hurt the boss by flipping gravity, but in actuality you just need to roll into the little spike tanks when they’re upside down.

And then we have the final boss. First phase isn’t too bad, bop his fingers or spindash in the corner and you’re good to go. The Big Arms theme plays here too, which makes this extra awesome. After that, well, good luck. Second phase isn’t too bad, but there’s an element or two that make it artificially difficult. The  torso has no collision box when the emerald is covered, which means if you miss the window, you’re instantly dropped into a death pit. It’s also a running boss fight, and these always end up being a pain because of how they autoscroll. The bit where you beat Eggman can also be precarious because if you collide in just the wrong way, he can knock you into the death pit. But hey, you beat him and then credits roll.

I didn’t get all the chaos emeralds on this run because I wasn’t really looking out for them. Luckily you can repeatedly play Angel Island and Mushroom Hill for the chaos and super emeralds respectively. Although try this shit without beating the game and welp, you’re going to be disappointed. This does make me wish that the game had a dedicated pause menu. Constantly soft-resetting the console is such an inconvenience. So yeah, kids, don’t take that fancy pause menu that Mania has for granted. Hell, don’t take any of the quality of life changes Mania brings for granted.

I digress though. So then you get the chaos emeralds, you run through Death Egg Zone again just in case you were having fun and then the Final Doom Zone starts.

Final Doom Zone:

Here’s the long and short of it; Super Sonic boss fights are usually bad. You’re dropped into an arena with a brand new control scheme, and differing rules from the rest of the game. This could easily be remedied with one simple change; Take away Super Sonic’s ability to fly. It doesn’t add anything, you can’t fly in normal stages and  it usually means the boss fights have to be designed around Super Sonic’s ability to fly. It leads to a final boss that doesn’t test any of the skills you have developed over the course of the game. While it might hold value narratively or as a visual spectacle, I’d argue that it hurts the overall design of the game. Final Bosses seem to be a troubling point for Sonic games.

Final Doom Zone though, it’s not great. Nothing is telegraphed to you, I remember dying like sixteen times here as a kid before I figured out what the fuck it is I’m meant to do.

So you spend some time collecting rings and pro tip, hang back here. There’s not enough screen real estate for you to see the rings coming. After that, you catch up to Eggman and redirect missiles into his face. Then you bop his Egg mech a few more times and yay, you beat Sonic 3 & Knuckles, here’s your reward. Was that worth it? Do you feel good? Is that what you like?

So before I get to my final thoughts, let me spend a minute on the bonus and special stages.

Bonus Stages:

Bonus Stages are fun little distractions you can enter for extra rings and continues. They’re mostly skippable but I highly recommend trying these as best you can, because honestly, you might really end up needing the lives. At least until you can grind lives in Launch Base Zone. After that feel free to ignore them.

The gumball machine is the least interesting of the bunch, and weirdly enough, only shows up in the Sonic & Knuckles half. I’m not sure if this is because of my settings or because they were arbitrarily exclusive to the second half but it would have been nice to break up the amount of Glowing Sphere stages I got. Speaking of, I used to hate Glowing Sphere, but because Titanic Monarch in Sonic Mania explained these so well through the level design, these ended up becoming my favourite. The slot machine is just Sonic 1’s special stage with a slot machine in the middle, and the combination of the awfulness that is the rotating stage and my shit luck means these can just get off my dick.

Blue Sphere:

Blue sphere is actually one of the better special stages, although I’d never say they’re my favourite. An unfortunate consequence of digital gaming is that you don’t often get an instruction manual, which explains a lot of Blue Sphere’s mechanics. Some of it is intuitive but some of the lesser known ones, like how you can redirect yourself after hitting a bumper by pressing forward, or that the blue spheres don’t need to be in a square shape to be turned into rings are among the ones that could probably do with some more signposting. Otherwise, turn 90 Degrees, make blue spheres red, turn clusters into rings. It’s deceptively simple.

Sometimes it feels like the game eats my input but it’s forgivable since it’s not something that happens often and Blue Sphere is a pretty twitchy with a low skill floor and a high skill ceiling. I think what also softens the blow of what might be a frustrating experience is that before Blue Sphere, we had the rotating special stages and the half-pipe. Those both suck, although Half Pipe sucks much less on iOS and Android. Blue Sphere is at least inoffensive. It might not be fully rendered 3D but it was as close as the base Genesis could get.

I’ve never really found any point to perfecting these stages, sure, you can earn extra lives and continues, but they’re not worth accidentally fucking up a chance at an emerald. I especially hate that even if you have all the emeralds, once you hit the & Knuckles point of the game, you’re not allowed to turn Super Sonic. Although you’re still given access to the final zone if you only have Super Sonic, which is welcome for sure. I have to admit, I welcome Angel Island placing the first big ring so close to the entrance, and the fact that the rom hack lets me skip the opening custscene is a true blessing.

Final Thoughts:

It’s a Sonic game, it feels pretty good. Sonic’s a bit too heavy for my liking, and I’ve always wished that Sonic started at a higher base speed, but otherwise I can’t complain.

I’ll admit that Tails and Knuckles still lack the polish that Sonic has, although Knuckles suffers the most. The baseball slide after gliding just feels awful, there’s no flow. He also drops like a rock when you release the jump button during a glide. While I find their moveset useful, I always feel like Knuckles and Tails both got shafted in the game feel department. Sonic is and always has been the most fun to control, and if Tails is along to give a hand on especially tricky sections, I’ve never felt the compulsion to fully complete a game as them. In fact, until Sonic Heroes I’ve always kind of been indifferent towards playing as them.

Sonic 3 & Knuckles is a great looking Genesis game. Colours pop, the full range of 16-bit colour depth is used and you can feel the emulated hardware just barely keeping up at times. Although I’d like each character to be a little brighter in colour, I have no complain with the overall graphical fidelity nor do I have any qualms with the overall visual aesthetic.

Character design, however, is different. I’ve never liked Sonic’s redesign in this game. Or at least, I like it less than his Sonic 2 design. Here, Sonic is really round and while he conveys his 90s attitude that American players might know him for, it looks surprisingly out of place next to the Japanese box art. Sonic just seems a lot more mature from the Japanese art, and you can only handle that 90s radicality for so long before it becomes insufferable. Tails and Knuckles are fine, even if Tails looks a little too brown for my liking.

Otherwise, the only thing that isn’t very well conveyed visually is when your invincibility is going to run out; As an experiment, turn the sound off next time you hit an invincibility monitor and then try gauge when your invincibility is going to run out. Granted, this isn’t as much an issue when you have sound on, but having the stars just become less numerous or fade to red or something would provide an adequate visual indication of when you’re going to run out of invincibility. The same for how long Sonic can hold his breath, however, this is made much less egregious by the five second count down to when you die.

The sound design in any Sonic game is never bad, badniks die with a satisfying pop, Sonic bloops when he jumps, rocks have that nice static crunch sound when the break, it’s all good stuff. I do wish the bloops could alternate in pitch, when jumping in rapid succession the same bloop starts sounding a little grating to the ears.

Nothing is quite as nerve wrecking as the drowning jingle. It’s the stuff of nightmares. Many buttholes have puckered when the anthem of death by water is played. It’s perfect. Although that’s more a compliment of Sonic 1’s sound design, I’m glad someone recognised that they didn’t need to fix what wasn’t broken.

Super Sonic playing the invincibility theme on a constant loop is hella annoying, though. Sonic games have some of the best music, and having the invincibility jingle play on loop when you turn super is so insanely annoying. I’m glad the rom hack instead changed it so the sped up version of the stage’s music for the speed shoes plays.

Sonic 3 & Knuckles does win in the replayability department, but the inherent nature of Sonic games just makes later playthroughs more fun than the first. Knowing the level design and having some skill at the game can greatly enhance the experience, so it’s never really fair to judge the game by the way you enjoyed it the first time because the first playthrough is almost never the best one. However, I complete these games every few years or so and Sonic 1 always remains the one I enjoy the most, even if I think it has the worst overall level design. Sonic 3 & Knuckles I enjoy more than Sonic 2, because I think it just has more solid levels and less entirely crap ones like Metropolis Zone. Fuck Metropolis Zone. The difficulty curve looks a little like a sin graph on account of how Sonic & Knuckles was technically released as a separate game, which means that once you get to Mushroom Hill, the game eases up considerably, but I think this actually ends up helping the game more than anything. It’s nice to have breathing room after a tough midway point.

The biggest hindrance is just the lack of a Retro Engine remake.

Do I like the game more now than I used to? I guess, but that’s a low bar since I used to hate this game. And every time I play it, I remember why. Sonic’s Weight combined with some truly awful zones along with that pudgy sprite makes this a game I guess I’d recommend playing, but it doesn’t end up in my top five. It’s a serviceable game. It’s alright. It has a lot of interesting trivia but maybe you just had to be there in 1994 with a Genesis and more tolerance for the games of the time. But I mean, I enjoy Sonic 1 & 2 even in their emulated versions so maybe it’s not even that, although I have a healthier dose of childhood nostalgia for those two. And I can’t say I wasn’t having fun at points because clearly I was. Which is what makes this so mixed. The best levels are still remarkably less quality than the best of previous titles but the worst are only slightly above Metropolis Zone. There’s just a fair amount of fucking me about involved here, and even my patience has its limits.

I mean, Generations has the sort of one and done fun I return to periodically just to blow off some steam, Mania might be stuffing all its holes with classic game dick but it also has a third arm hanging between its legs which means it has the definitive version of some of these levels, all with a shiny new coat of paint and a 60FPS lock. It’s the purity of classic Sonic without all the caveats.

I guess the person I recommend this to is the one still getting into Sonic and is still working their way through the classic games. I think you need to play this at least once to have any credibility as a Sonic fan. You’re going to be much better informed if you can understand what this game does right and what it doesn’t. But you don’t need to enjoy it. And for the love of God, don’t hold it up as some perfect specimen of a Sonic game.

And stop fucking parroting speed, platforming and exploration. Yeah, it’s a useful framework but it’s also a set of buzzwords some dude threw together in a three hour rant about a cartoon hedgehog. Reductionism is the tool of the lazy backseat designer, so to quote KingK, walk it down a peg.

But to beat a dead horse, here are other buzzword phrases that sound as important but are also as abstract and devoid of meaning divorced from the interpretation of any specific individual.

Cheese, wine and crackers. Snap, crackle and pop. Harder, better, stronger. Tom, Dick and Harry. Chris, Chris and Chris. Veni, Vidi, Vici. Strength, Courage and Wisdom. Earth, Wind and Fire. The lion, the witch and the wardrobe. Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup. Hyue, Due and Louie. Sora, Donald and Goofy.Ed, Edd and Eddy.

And I don’t know about you, but I 100% want to play the Sonic game by the guy who prioritizes cheese, wine and crackers. That sounds like my kind of game.