There's a great dichotomy when it comes to discovering something. Either something is hyped up to death and somehow lives up to expectations, or something is talked down so much that you find yourself wholly surprised when you enjoy it despite its so called shortcomings. Sonic 06 is very much like the second one. It's a bad game. There's no defending it. And while the Silver campaign is arguably the best thing in it, it's not nearly enough to salvage the rest of the title. That being said, Sonic 06 is also sort of weirdly enjoyable because of how bad it is. In a lot of ways, it's like Shadow the Hedgehog. Both games are terrible, and cast a horribly uneven light on a franchise already fraught with infighting from its own fanbase. But they're also sort of weirdly fun if you like bad games. They're the Mystery Science Theater of bad gaming.
The same, however, cannot bad said for Sonic CD, which falls into the first category mentioned. A game so overhyped, primarily due to Sega's outright unwillingness to re-release it for years (who could've known they were saving us from ourselves in hindsight), it's a game with such an enormous 16 bit chip on its shoulder that you expect it to not only be the best classic Sonic title, but also be able to cure diseases and end world hunger. And perhaps, with nostalgia colored glasses, one could forgive someones opinion on it. After all, we all have our "bad thing we can't objectively hate because we love it from out past" in our libraries, lord knows I have plenty of them. I can forgive those who might have a fondness purely because of when they experienced it. But objectively, even I can manage to look at other classic Sonic games I grew up playing and realize there's something off with them.
Sonic 1, for example, is slow. It's clunky. It's a lot more platforming than running. That doesn't sit well with people, especially in a franchise often discussed for its speed and high intensity movement. I still like the first Sonic game, but I can objectively recognize its faults, its flaws and its shortcomings. Sonic 2, arguably the best classic Sonic game and definitely my favorite, also has problems. For one, it's a tad too short. It's almost too fast. It's got a special zone that, understandably, may make some sick. Sonic 3 is awful. Sonic 3 has the most uninspired soundtrack (even in the original, yes) and its levels are so massive that it's outright impossible to finish them without simply holding the left button on your Dpad. Suddenly what was often the most overused criticism of the franchise has now become Sonic 3's saving grace. You just wanna get to the next level as fast as possible, and not because it's fun.
But Sonic CD is a mess on a whole other level, and doesn't work in any regard. And while I can appreciate, hell, even respect, when a franchise tries to do something different after such massive success - like Halloween 3, for example - I also have to state how it doesn't work, and oh man, almost everything in Sonic CD doesn't work.
They've taken a game that was designed for speed and turned it into an exploration based platformer. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, except that the levels are so poorly designed, such a incoherent mess of visuals, that you often do the same thing you did for Sonic 3, which is try and just get through them by simply holding right and hoping Sonic does all the work, getting to the goal primarily on his own without much more input from you. And what's more, is its gimmick. Sonic became more and more gimmicky over the years, and again, not necessarily a bad thing. Sonic Heroes, for example, was based entirely around a gimmick, and it kinda sorta worked. It, again, doesn't work in Sonic CD, and, again, primarily due to its shoddy level design. The gimmick in Sonic CD, for those unaware, is that you can play each level in the past, present or future. There are sign posts you must hit to visit either the past or future. Now, here's where the cool idea breaks down into an unworkable mechanic.
Because in order to initiate the time travel mechanic, not only do you have to find the sign posts - and "past" is the one you want most, and it's often the one you find least - but then you have to find a long enough straightaway in order to run fast enough to get it to send you to the past. If you don't find and do this in time, you lose the option, and have to find not only another sign post, but another straight away. In a game whose level design is so impossible to navigate, this becomes a monumental tasks of almost impossibility. And, to make matters worse, because the levels are so poorly designed, you'll often take too long trying to find either one of those, and run out of time altogether. Again, your best option is to simply hold right and hope to reach the goal. Survival winds up being your goal more than anything else.
And you do have the option to ignore the time travel mechanic and instead keep enough rings to activate the special stages at the end of levels, get the time stones (this games substitute for Chaos Emeralds) and get the good ending that way, but good luck getting to the end of the level with enough rings, because it's almost impossible to do, just like everything else in this game. And what's even worse is that, by implementing this workaround, the developers seemingly acknowledge that their mechanic works so poorly that they had to offer an alternative.
And what's worse is its bosses are barely bosses. More often than not, your goal, again, comes down to simply surviving the encounter and waiting for the boss to kill itself. For example, in Wacky Workbench, the boss fight is you on a conveyor belt while bombs drop from above that you have to avoid. This would be fine, except you aren't allowed to attack Robotnik. No. He's in a small metal tube that gets worn down on the belt the longer the "fight" goes on. Therefore, there is no fight. Your entire "boss fight" is now simply waiting for Robotnik to ruin his own device, after which it inexplicably explodes and you are allowed to go to the goal post. Most of the boss fights in this game are like this, by the way. And even worse than that are their outright level lifting from better levels, with mechanics taken from better levels and implemented more poorly. You want an example? Okay. Here.
This is Starlight Zone, from Sonic 1.
As you can see, this level takes place in a starry sort of night sky on which you run across pretty multicolored platformers.
And this is Stardust Speedway, from Sonic CD.
A totally original and different level that takes place in a starry sort of night sky...on which you...run across....multicolored...platforms.
It's the same level concept, just a thousand times worse. It's impossible to navigate, it's uglier, and it's hard to tell what's in the foreground and what's in the background and often what it is you're meant to be interacting with. And, they even outright stole a mechanic Sonic 02. In Sonic 02, in Casino Night, there are segments where you wind up tube like puzzles where you are thrown from spring to spring and have to press right or left in order to go the correct direction to further your progress. Stardust uses this exact mechanic, but way worse. Now, not only is it so fast and lasts so long that you can't exactly tell where it is you're supposed to go, but it can go on indefinitely if you make the wrong decision, which you will, because it's visually incoherent. And, yet again, the act ends with a boss that you simply have to survive, until getting a single hit on, upon which you win. And if you say "Well, you can't steal ideas from your own franchise!" let me assure you they can, because this and Sonic 02 were not in fact developed by the same team, and in fact this game came out a year LATER than Sonic 02.
Make no mistake. Sonic CD is bad. It's not even enjoyably bad, like Sonic 06 or Shadow the Hedgehog. It's bad bad. It's the bad kind of bad. It's the kind of bad that makes you drop your jaw in outright awe at its badness. At how the people making this could think they were making something worthwhile, something people might enjoy. Again, I recognize nostalgia often clouds objective viewpoints, and makes it harder for those who maybe grew up with it to criticize it properly, but even I'm capable of doing that with the games I loved, as I showed above. The original Genesis titles all have their pros and cons. This ones cons are just maximized on a greater scope, likely because its pros are virtually nonexistent. Yes, CD gave us some good stuff, I won't deny it. The Sonic Boom song is a delight, they introduced Amy and true Metal Sonic, and the original animated intro and outro are fantastic. But none of those are worth anything if the game they originated from are atrocious, and Sonic CD is atrocious.
I debated whether to make this a review or not, and opted not to because my reviews are not actually often reviews, and this one actually is, so I didn't want to lump this one off in with my regular reviews, hence why it's simply a wall of text. I'm sorry if you read through this, and I'm sorry if it was too long, but I'm the one who recently had to suffer through this in Sonic Origins, so I figured you'd be kind enough to share in my pain vicariously. Do not, under any circumstances, be fooled by the hype. Yes, sometimes the hype is real. Sometimes the restaurant is 5 stars. And sometimes they serve you a cowboy boot filled with dead insects and dish soap.
And in this case, Sonic CD's hype is, sadly, the latter.
