Sonic Unleashed (Part 3)

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3

Time to give Eggmanland a visit, and Eggman a proper beating.

Let's tear it all to pieces.

Eggmanland

I made sure to stock up on extra lives before entering the final stage, as I knew it was going to be one Hell of a ride – at least, from what I had heard. Turns out, I was mistaken; in the Wii and PS2 versions of Sonic Unleashed, the area is split into proper stages. One stage as Sonic, two bonus missions (UGH), then five stages as Werehog Sonic. However, the HD versions (Xbox 360/PS3) are very different in that regard: Sonic can use special hourglasses to switch from day to night, and thus between forms, within the stage. The result is infamous as one of the longest marathon levels ever designed, taking fifteen minutes to finish – and that’s without mistakes. It can take nearly an hour to finish it otherwise. I’m mentioning it for the sake of trivia, as that’s not what happens in the version I played.

Goddammit, I was looking at this from a completely
different angle just a second ago! I lost my groove!

That said, Eggmanland on the Wii is still a long stage that takes five minutes to complete without fault. And it’s got all of the cheapest tricks. I know it’s the final day stage so it has to be tough, but I feel like most of my failures here were caused by poor design. A common issue in Sonic stages is when the camera switches quickly from a side view (for 2D segments) to a back view (for 3D segments where Sonic can move left or right), and this has tripped me up in several areas. As an example, that short bit spent riding a car-shaped roller coaster seat. Due to my ongoing problems with the Quick Step, some late-stage portions were massively annoying, so I opted to pass those slowly instead of speeding through.

Can't tell you how many times I died in places that were
stupid traps, like here, failing to adjust with the angled
terrain and falling off...

Near the end of the stage, you have a straight path with
holes and very little time to Quick Step aside in time.
Considering my bad luck with Quick Step, and that a single
mistake at that point wastes half a minute from you...
I fucking HATED this mission, in case I wasn't clear already.

So the stage is finished, right? WRONG. The next two missions are set in the same stage. The first is a classic “Collect X rings”, and it’s easy. The other forces you through the ENTIRE stage, with an impossible time limit that can only be lengthened by passing through checkpoints. I disliked the original stage, but I HATED that specific mission, as I had to play quickly, and it was stupid easy in specific spots to die and lose several seconds after reappearing at the (somewhat rare) respawn points. Oh, and that mission is MANDATORY. You can’t move on until you do it. Fucking WHY??? This is not necessary! We wouldn’t lose anything if that stage was optional!

Take that, Donkey Kong!

Lots of enemies, but... really, that's nothing by this point.

Past this, night falls, so we have five Werehog stages. We go from Eggmanland to the bowels of the continent, all the way down to the seventh Gaia Temple. …Not much to say here; those require all the skills you’ve learned, but they’re not too difficult. It just takes a while to go through them. At the very bottom, at last, the Temple. We restore the final Chaos Emerald, and then…

In later games, we do fight the Egg Dragoon as regular
Sonic, and yes, the fight turns out to be a lot tougher.

Eggman attacks! Over a stage too small to run anywhere, using the Egg Dragoon, a robot perfectly designed to stop anything Sonic could do. ....Regular Sonic, that is. However, the Werehog is perfectly equipped against its tricks. This climactic battle ends up on the easy side as a result; not nearly as tough its placement should have made it. The battle took place on pieces of ground hanging over the core of the planet, and breaking mid-fight. At the end, when the Egg Dragoon is destroyed, we have reached the core. And what awaits down there?

I am Gaia

...We're gonna need an even bigger hedgehog.

Dark Gaia emerges from the magma of the planet’s core. This thing is big like a goddamn kaiju. Eggman instantly tries to boss it around, only to get swatted away. He’s blasting off agaaaaaaaaai-*twink*. Worse even, the monster saps its own dark energy out of Sonic’s werehog form, reverting him to his normal self. Welp, so much for hoping to have the form stick around for the final boss. With no other way to stop this creature, Chip calls to the energy of the Chaos Emeralds, which had been kept in the temples that restored them – and his call uproots all seven temples and pulls them towards the final battle. Chip shapes them around him into forming a giant mecha-

…Okay, it makes no sense, but it is kinda cool-

Nothing quite like punching an Eldritch abomination
right in the goddamn jaw.

-Which is smaller than Dark Gaia but capable of fighting back. Final boss time! Phase 1 is a boxing match between Dark Gaia and the Gaia Colossus. Evading punches left and right, and striking back. Whoever designed this fight wanted to pay homage to Punch-Out!. True to form, the final battle of a Sonic game involves new mechanics not seen anywhere else in the whole adventure, forcing the player to learn them through trial and error. It’s not a phase that’s too difficult, thankfully.

Apparently Sonic needs the extra boost of very precise
buttom-pressing.

Phase 2. Dark Gaia immobilizes the Colossus; Gaia's its weak points, the green eyes, are revealed. We control Sonic through short platforming stages, avoiding the energy tendrils, and zooming into the eyes to smash them. This involves QTEs, a gameplay element that's appeared occasionally across Sonic Unleashed's day levels, but it’s not too bothersome. Popping all three pisses off the monster, and it unleashes (heh) its energy across the planet, making everyone fall into despair as doom seems imminent. However, Amy remains hopeful.

Yeah, this thing was already not close to winning any
beauty prizes, but now... It's really fugly.

Peekaboo! Surprise eye test! Did you feel this?

For Phase, 3, Gaia sprouts extra arms, and its “mouth” opens across the length of its head to reveal seven more green eyes. Thanks to Chip, the Chaos Emeralds leave their temples and transform Sonic into his Super form for the fight. Do I sense more gameplay changes never seen before over the course of Unleashed? Of course! Super Sonic uses up a ring every few seconds to stay in the form, so he needs to collect those floating around. He'll lose some whenever he gets hit by Dark Gaia’s attacks, and spends exactly 10  to dash forward to attack one of the boss’s weak points – the six eyes, three on each side, and the seventh one in the center last. As more of its eyes are popped (yuck), Gaia’s attacks get faster. It has a nasty move where it strikes with all six limbs, and the only safe spot is a small area at the center of the screen – so small, that it’s very easy to be just a bit off, think you’re in the right spot, and get hurt anyway. Past a certain point in the fight, you must even move Super Sonic closer to the top of the “battle”, left or right, to make the auto-aim crosshair appear on the eyes you’ve still got to pop. And, you still need to have rings. Oh, and when you aim for each eye, you also need to dodge the meteorites sent Sonic’s way.

Freaking hated the six-pronged attack too.

Yeah, I didn’t like that fight. Some things were explained poorly, I would frequently run out of rings (especially due to the six-pronged attack), and the crosshairs seemed to appear almost at random, even after I learned, by looking it up online, that I had to move up left or right to get closer to them, as there is no clear indication that you have to do that. I also kept losing with just the final eye to pop due to the increased speed of the meteorites sent Sonic's way, and the struggle at keeping enough rings at that point to even be able to attack.

A final blow and Dark Gaia is destroyed, sinking back into the planet’s core, where it returns to sleep. The fight was so intense that Sonic collapses just as he comes out of the Super form, something that never happened before. The planet reforms properly as Dark Gaia’s influence dissipates. Everyone around the planet celebrates. Eggman is stranded in the desert, contemplating his greatest failure yet. Eh, he always comes back.

Too bad it's a character that, by lore, cannot awaken again
to return for another story, unless the planet splits apart
once more.

Light Gaia must return to slumber, so he tells some final goodbyes to Sonic before vanishing. The Gaia Colossus tosses Sonic out of the center of the planet, and the hedgehog lands face-first on Windmill Isle. Pulling his head out of the ground, he thinks he sees Chip, but the apparition disappears, leaving behind the necklace the fairy chihuahua wore, large enough for Sonic to use as a bracelet. He hears some parting words from his friend, who says he’ll never forget the hero. Everything’s back to normal, so Sonic goes for a victory run, followed by Tails in his plane. The end.

Final thoughts

A lot of daytime levels here represent the best from
regular Sonic gameplay. "A lot", not "all".

In case that wasn’t too clear, I’m ambivalent on this one. There are things Sonic Unleashed does very well, and others less so. Its biggest issue can be likened to an identity crisis; as though there are two completely different games mishmashed together into one, without much aside from plot to justify their coexistence. We’re already aware of Sonic’s usual speed-based gameplay, going through levels that have multiple paths, with a switch between a 2D side-view and a 3D back-view. For the most part, these levels are great! But there are instances near the end of the game where these elements combine for very cheap traps that lead to losing lives. I also kept struggling with the Quick Step, which would often fail to register when using the Wii remote and the Nunchuk (thankfully, if those and waggle controls annoy you, you can play with a Classic or GameCube controller instead).

The nighttime environments are quite lovely.

We play much more as a Werehog, and while this is far removed from usual Sonic fare, I'd consider it a decent shakeup of the formula. The new form lends itself to both beat-‘em-up combat and puzzle-solving, allowing for levels where both shine. The slower gameplay encourages exploration, as you can go back to previous parts to find items, something often impossible in the day stages. The Werehog form isn’t perfect; it lacks an aiming feature in combat, which makes some battles annoying. Its dash is very easy to trigger by accident, and it’s very difficult to stop – which can be a major issue in platforming-heavy night stages.

I do wish I had gotten the content that was cut from the
version I played...

Both sides of this coin are adorned with extra missions set in stages we’ve already completed. This would be fine, if it weren’t that several are mandatory for game completion rather than optional side-stuff you can do at your leisure. Want to reach the Werehog stages in Eggmanland? Screw you, here’s an uber-annoying timed version of the lengthy level you just played twice already. Ugh. To make it worse, some content was cut in the Wii and PS2 editions of the game, and it's obvious; the only true level on the Mazuri continent is a fight against Eggman, and nothing else.

And, oh yeah, special mention goes to the “Continue playing?” message that will pop up after every goddamn level. I know there was a need to tell kids to take breaks when gaming, but having that message appear literally every five minutes is not the solution.

The doors you can see on the right, here, lead to
fun puzzle/platform moments.

On the plus side, I do like the idea of each temple having doors that open after you’ve collected enough medals of both types, and your reward being goodies and extra lives. I like the story; I think it’s a fun idea to have Eggman in a position of strength, and Sonic forced to deal with something weird that’s happening to him. I also like that the monsters we fight at nighttime are physical forms of the Dark Gaia energy that’s making everyone on the planet feel terrible. This game made the cosmology of the Sonic world even weirder than before, but whatever. Admittedly, the plot proper does take a moment to kick into gear, and the presentation using RPG-style chats with NPCs is a tad on the bland side. But it does gets interesting. The game also looks great for the time, and as usual for Sonic games, has an excellent soundtrack.

All in all, Sonic Unleashed has its major flaws – but the ones I saw while playing it are different to the ones that were pointed out when the game was fresh. Barring some especially annoying stages and moments that stand out against the rest, I overall enjoyed my time, though this may be one of those games where just beating it felt more than enough.

Sixteen years after its release, Sonic Unleashed is looked at more fondly. Both its parts, even if they don’t fully fit together, get the praise they deserve. However, the franchise in the late 00’s was in a rough spot. After the disaster of ’06 (and let’s not mince words – it was a disaster), instead of going back to more classic gameplay for a new entry (be it a 2D or Adventure-style game), SEGA fell into a long period of experimentation that only pushed fans away. Past the Storybook games (Secret Rings/Black Knight) and Unleashed, it took four years for Sonic to regain the fans’ favors with Colors, which doesn’t throw anything too out of the ordinary on top of the modern Sonic gameplay people wanted. The Wisps were very well-received, because they mix so well with Sonic's classic ways. (Huh, I have now reviewed all four of these games.) It is only with the gift of hindsight that we can say those games, in that awkward period between ’06 and Colors, might not have been that bad after all, and that at least part of the harsh reception was disappointment at the franchise not climbing the hill back up slowly but surely.

But hey, what do I know. I’m not a Sonic historian or something. The franchise has recovered, that's what matters.

That's it for now! Tune in next week for something else!