Sonic 06 is the Worst Game Ever Part 5 - Final Story

Catch up on the earlier parts - Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Welcome to the final part of my insanely long series of articles about Sonic the Hedgehog 2006. I was originally going to do one more, but I decided I had enough of these. To finish up, I'm taking a look at the final story that wraps up the loose plot threads from the other character's stories, namely Shadow's. It is perhaps the absolute worst part of the game. All of the things wrong with the game come together to form one impressively bad package of fail.

When we last left Shadow, he was being surrounded by a bunch of Mephiles clones. I don't remember what happened with the clones, but Mephiles goes super saiyan or something and then, out of the blue, stabs Sonic in the back with a giant spear or something like that. Point is, Sonic is dead. To fix this, everyone obviously has to split up and go find all of the chaos emeralds. What follows is the worst series of levels ever created.



You must go through a level with every single character, from Tails to Rouge to Omega to Knuckles, no minor character is left un-utilized. You get to experience the fun of trying to fight the already poor controls of these characters with all new, annoying obstacles, such as the black hole. Yes, throughout the levels random black holes will appear and start sucking in anyone who is too close by, insta-killing anyone who touches them. These black holes will appear quite suddenly and are pretty hard to dodge if you're not careful. Because this is Sonic 06, being careful is nigh-impossible.

Remember that Let's Play I occasionally posted in this series? It took them almost two hours to beat these horrible levels. These horrible levels that are shorter than the usual ones. The only saving grace is that Sonic is dead so no mach speed sections. Also Knuckles' level is so horribly designed that you can jump off the opening platform and just glide to the goal in about forty seconds.



Also, if you don't hit these light beacons every ninety seconds or so the world ends or something, killing you. All of this would merely be on par with the horribleness of the rest of the game if it weren't for one thing: you can never save. If you get game over, you start from the very beginning. You have to play as Tails, Omega, Knuckles, Silver, Rouge, Amy, and Shadow over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Relive Tails running super slow into a black hole, Omega's annoying fights, the brief reprieve that Knuckles' poor level design offers, the annoying psychic puzzles with Silver, the frustratingly confusing Rouge level, Amy, and the absolutely broken Shadow level.


Once you somehow manage to get all of the chaos emeralds, it's time to bring Sonic back to life. This is when the infamous kiss scene happens. Since the chaos emeralds can do whatever the writers want them to do, the characters begin doing something or other to bring Sonic back to life, but it doesn't work. This means Elise clearly needs to kiss Sonic, bringing him back to life and turning him into Super Sonic. Shadow and Silver then go super hedgehog as well, and the final boss fight begins.



The plot details are a bit vague, my mind was already mush from the horrible set of levels I just had to endure. What came next killed what was left of my sanity. The super hedgehogs have to fight Solaris, the fire god that is not Iblis but actually--you know what, screw this. They have a boss battle that is a giant god thing. It is perhaps the worst design for a boss battle ever. If you play Sonic, you know that your ring count goes down constantly while in the super hedgehog form. There is no way to regain rings aside from switching between hedgehogs and just waiting. When you're not using a character, they slowly gather more rings automatically, so while you're playing Silver, Shadow's and Sonic's ring counts are going up.

To hurt the boss, you need to use your three super hedgehog's attacks, but you have to attack with them in a particular order. So when you have to use Silver and his rings are too low, the game becomes you mashing the dash button as Shadow or Sonic. This keeps the current character safe while you have the joy of waiting forever for the character you need to do anything regain his rings. I ate dinner while "fighting" the boss. I grabbed some food, and hit the dash button with my foot. When I finished my dinner I decided to play my DS and listen to music during the "battle."



Yes, I played my DS while playing Sonic 06 because the game was so broken that it required me to do nothing. To make things worse, it isn't very clear at first that you have to use specific characters. They also change the controls for Silver's psychokinetics, just because. After the long, drawn-out, poorly-designed battle, you are faced with the ending. I really can't remember it anymore. I'm surprised I didn't block out this whole section really. I think you alter time so that none of this ever happened and everyone's safe. I don't know, all I know is that it was over. Finally over.

With that, this series of articles is finally over as well. Playing Sonic 06 was a horrible experience, and I cannot remember exactly why I did it in the first place. I think it was a dare or something. The point is, it was the worst game it has ever been my displeasure to play. Never play this game, ever. Even if you think it might be amusing in its horribleness, don't. Don't make the same mistake I did. Only you can prevent Sonic 06.

To finish you out, even more AMVs of Sonic and Elise. Watch the first one, it's set to "Living on a Prayer" for some reason.
It is at this point that I stopped adding AMVs. There were more. So many more. So, so many more. Why? Why?

Comments

[AeonPhoenix]

Anytime you think Sega's next Sonic game will be better, just remember Sonic 06.

[Andrew Craft]

Well I guess they learned their lesson though because the next "3D" sonic is going to entirely be a side-scroller. So im hopeing its like sonic 2 and 3, just with better graphics. But I am still keeping myself sane and I am going to take AeonPhoenix's advice