Gotta Get K.O! The Incorporation of Combat in Sonic The Hedgehog Games

What’s this? An article that concerns Sonic the Hedgehog that is not complaining about Sonic using vehicles, Sonic looking leaner than before, Sonic kissing a human girl? It’s a lot more common than you think.

Alright, so I can safely assume everyone reading this article has played a Sonic the Hedgehog game and is familiar with the general concept of a blue, anthropomorphic hedgehog using super-speed to defeat an overweight, mad scientist intent on making robot furries, ruling the world under the Eggman Empire and creating Eggmanland! Is that a safe guess? Alright, so I’ve been revisiting some of my old Sonic games and realising that, at a significant portion of Sonic’s life, he had a bit of a “combat” theme going on about him.

And I am not just talking about that Gameboy Advance party-fighter game Sonic Battle, or his appearance in Smash Bros. Brawl. I mean his mainstream games had a fair few elements where the game wanted you to get combat-focused. The Power class characters in Sonic Heroes, the weapon play in Shadow the Hedgehog, the sword play in Sonic and the Black Knight and so on; they all had the player use more combative solutions to problems. But why did this appear? And why did it suck?

“Isn’t it obvious Greg” I somehow hear you say? (Get your voice out of my head!) “SEGA was being stupid; though fighting is cool, they slapped it on without any design thought! I mean what part of ‘blue hedgehog that moves at high speeds’ screams ‘fighting’ anyhow

Well my reply to you is “What part of blue hedgehog that moves at high speeds screams Dragonball Z?”

Why did Akira Toriyama not sue? Was he a big fan of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 or something? (Reference)

But on a more serious note, I doubt SEGA just added it because “it’d look cool”: in fact, I reckon the reasoning for this was more a test for a new system of designing the gameplay for Sonic’s future games.

Although Sonic the Hedgehog was (and still is in some respects) a good game, it had a few oddities that clearly came from experimentation and lack of experience, forgivable seeing they were trying to make a platforming game that was fast-paced, something not really (if at all) touched on back in the day. As a result, the game often had cases where the proverbial game shift from “Gotta go fast!” to “Platformer” came with a deafening THUNK as exampled by Green Hill Zone versus Marble Zone.

So how did Hirokazu Yasuhara, Sonic the Hedgehog 1-3’s game planner, circumvent this issue and made the trilogy the gemstones of video games they are? How did Yasuhara make speedy platforming possible? Easy, he made Sonic fly!

Where’s a ‘John Williams’ score when you need one? (Reference)

Essentially, the gap between “Gotta Go Fast!” and “Platforming” became tightened and the two elements became more modular: they were more welcoming to the instinctive side of your brain. Parts of games following Sonic the Hedgehog 2 had a new structure.

Impulsive speed > Interruption > Platforming/Danger

To explain, I will take from Sonic the Hedgehog 2’s Chemical Plant Zone.

The first section (Impulsive speed) is where the player gets a taste of Sonic’s natural speed, rolling down hills, sprinting through loop-de-loops and so on. In Chemical Plant’s case, this is seen when you drop into the high speed pipes and start getting shot around as you hear the sound for Sonic’s “Super Spin Dash” roar, emphasising that you are going fast and this is awesome. 

The second part (Interruption) is where the player is given a change to the speed to prepare him for the next section. This one is a hard one although it has a popular solution, as the game wants you to stop running like a loony but a brick wall or something as simple would either kill the flow of Sonic’s antics and dissolve some of the fun or (worse still) make the player feel punished for enjoying themselves. The popular solution to this, as demonstrated once again in Chemical Plant Zone, is to shoot the player straight up into the air. How does this work? Well, the flow is preserved without the movement being hard to maintain, the sudden change of environment clicks in the player’s mind “Hey, slow down, something’s happening”, and, when used frequently, allows for a universal message in terms of platforming. 

The final part (Platforming/Danger) is where the player, having been stopped by the interruption and gained their bearings, can now engage in more thoughtful activities such as platforming or the like. In most Sonic games, with Chemical Plant Zone being far from exemption, the platforming is very vertical and often leading upwards. This is again deliberate as it helps maintain a universal message that best correlates with the popular “To the Skies!” interruption technique.

Now what does this have to do with Sonic games having combat portions in them? Well, you may have noticed that this technique seems a bit limiting and threatens to be boring to audiences. Surprisingly, SEGA did too and they felt that, after 9-10 years using the same formula, it was time that they tried to refine it, set new conventions and keep the spiky-blue blur fresh to truly hybridise speed and platforming.

This led to the release of Sonic Heroes, a game that moulded together speed and platforming to form a much smoother game experience. Of course, there was a problem with the game now; both elements became weaker from combining. Much like an acid and an alkaline, the two elements when combined lost their initial values from neutralising. Suddenly, the smoother gameplay resulted in less speedy set-pieces or moments where you really got your kicks from speeding. Don’t get me wrong, it was still there, but it was just not as strong. Same for platforming: the old, vertical ventures became less frequent and if they did appear were often not too impressive, with an example being anytime Sonic Heroes wanted you to use your flight character (I’d say Tails in Team Sonic was my least-used character, but then I remember Sonic being a pest to control).

So how was the Sonic Team going to solve the dilution of the impulsive speed sections and the thoughtful platforming? That is where combat came in. Well, this is fine, except now we must wonder how this ended up eventually falling out of favour. I like to attribute it to a mixture of things, with each problem often relying to a different game that incorporated the combat.

One problem was poor feedback. In Sonic Heroes, whenever I played as the power class, I often would find it boring since I got little feedback after killing one of Eggman’s robots. Upon death, they just gave a small explosion and accompanying explosion noise, and then some score appears that I hardly noticed without my on-point team character quipping a random remark like “Not Bad!” or something. In contrast, look up Sonic the Fighters and see the stuff that happens to the characters as they get attacked.

(Reference)

What you’ll notice is that the impact from getting hit causes the enemy to react, reeling back from the blow and, in poor Tails’ case, get stretched as Sonic launches him into the air. Look at the stars and even rings sparking out from impact and, though I couldn’t get a picture to prove it, there’s impact shown as the opponent is knocked into the stage walls and as they crater to the ground from being launched into the air. Why can’t I have Knuckles doing that to my opponents instead of bouncing on their heads as he tries to punch the Earth and end his 3-hit combos? I want glorification for my combat even if all I did was mash the attack button!

That reminds me, another problem is that fighting can get redundant quickly in some games, most notably “The Game That Shan’t Be Named” during Shadow’s combat portions. Basically, in said game that deserves to be kept quiet, Shadow loses some of his speed that was equal to Sonic in favour of being more combat-focused. That is okay, I suppose. The problem is that the combat is not all that thrilling since every battle is the same combat structure. Repeat this about 24 times and you have the equivalent of a single level in Shadow’s story within that game I won’t name. That is your answer to every battle more or less, and it gets dull quickly, not helping is the fact that Shadow’s little attack combo thing that he does after a homing attack has nothing unique to it at all, nothing really exotic beyond occasionally turning around to deliver a roundhouse kick.

So there you have two core flaws with the combat: poor response and poor variety. So, is there a third? Of course there is: poor placement.

Yes, as a consequence to having smoothed the formula, SEGA struggles to formulate where exactly to place “combat to continue” areas and the like, resulting in them often interfering with moments of speed before the interruption period (I’m looking at you, Sonic and the Black Knight: being knocked back into an abyss after a running jump is a real jerk move), resulting in even the best designed combat systems in Sonic games to be resented since they interfered with Sonic’s running, and boy do people hate that!

And that just about wraps up my reflection on “Sonic the Kung Fu ‘Hog”, how it came to be and how it has likely ceased to be now that Sonic gameplay changed from “hybridised speed-platforming” into “SPEED-SPEED-SPEED”, only to then change back into the classic “speed-break-jump” system as of Sonic Generations. Will Sonic ever return to the combat system? Probably not, but if it does you can bet your bottom coin (see what I did there, huh?) that I will find a way to disagree with the Internet about it like I have with Resident Evil 6. 

What’s next..?