Sonic Series: Sonic 3 & Knuckles
This is the final part of my series on the Mega Drive (and Mega CD) main series Sonic games! I recommend going through in order as each article builds upon what I’ve written previously. Start here with my analysis of the original Sonic the Hedgehog.
With Sonic the Hedgehog 2 being such a huge hit, another sequel was instantly in the pipeline. In order to create the game with the scale that Naka and Yasuhara originally wanted Sonic 2 to have, as well as meet deadline expectations and appease SEGA executives, it was decided somewhat early on that this new game was to be split in two— Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Sonic & Knuckles, which could then be combined a full experience — Sonic 3 & Knuckles.
AESTHETICS
An issue with developing another sequel, however, is that Masato Nakamura’s rise to worldwide charts made hiring him or using his previous compositions too expensive. For that reason, SEGA decided not to hire him again, and avoid the complications of the availability and costs of a famous pop artist…
…except that the person they went for instead was Michael Jackson himself.
Michael Jackson had a really good relationship with SEGA at the time and was ecstatic to compose for a Sonic game. Of the songs he and his team composed, some can still be found in the final version of Sonic 3. Michael allegedly requested to not be credited, as he felt frustrated with the audio limitations of the Mega Drive. Ironic, then, that SEGA seems to be using Masato Nakamura’s compositions a lot more freely lately, but still have many legal issues with the involvement of Michael and his team on Sonic 3 (Hence why this is the only game out of this review series without an improved mobile version). They couldn’t even boast about having MJ or his team working on the game, and actively deny anything that they produced being in the final game to avoid any potential problems.
Sonic 3 & Knuckles’ soundtrack is really incredible, despite MJ’s feelings on his tracks, despite being created by so many completely different musicians and despite no Nakamura. It feels cohesive, cool, and true to Sonic and the high quality set by the prequels — perhaps even exceeding them.
Graphically, Sonic 3&K has me torn. Its visuals are very elaborate and well-made, achieving the aesthetics that the Sonic series always attempted at: Graphics that look CG, with a lot of volume and texture, while still being easy to read and visually interesting. This is of note because of how often pre-rendered graphics on the Mega Drive (or even most 16 and 32-bit systems) would look muddy and gaudy.
This was achieved by manually drawing over the pre-rendered graphics, rather than just digitizing them and leaving as-is. This technique was also used on both Sonic 2 and Sonic CD, though to lesser extents. However, Sonic 3&K obsesses over getting rid of the flatness of 2D graphics to a fault, relying on pre-rendered graphics and dirty textures even when they don’t look good.
CONTROLS
Sonic 3&K’s controls are very similar to Sonic 2's, though it introduces a new move: By pressing jump again in midair, a slashing effect surrounds Sonic. For a split second, this increases Sonic’s hitbox range, makes him invulnerable, and can even deflect projectiles. This ability, known as the Double Spin Attack — or the Insta-Shield, is basically a parry. Instead of slowing down or stopping to deal with an enemy’s spikes or invulnerable frames, popping the Insta-Shield at the right time can help you keep your momentum, helping players to not be afraid of picking up speed.
Also introduced in this game are the elemental shields. The shield power-up is replaced by three new shields, each with different properties besides protecting the player from damage. The Flame Shield grants you invulnerability to fire, the Bubble Shield prevents drowning, and the Lightning Shield attracts nearby rings like a magnet. Each also replaces Sonic’s Insta-Shield with an air dash, a downwards bounce, and a double jump respectively. This is a nice way to give Sonic mobility power-ups and some much needed variety on its mechanics, like its own spin on Super Mario power-ups.
The game also introduces new playable characters, Tails and Knuckles. While you can play as Tails in Sonic 2, here he no longer plays identically to Sonic, being able to fly at will. Meanwhile, Knuckles can glide and climb nearly every wall.
With so much mobility given to the player, when previous games already allowed you to fly over half of a level with enough speed, level design has now to be crafted even more carefully to accommodate all these different abilities.
LEVEL DESIGN
Their solution was to make levels completely closed off from the top, forcing all of its level sections — regardless of what tier they’re on — to have low ceilings, even those supposedly representing open areas. This doesn’t affect the overall game too much, other than limiting huge skips. Levels will also break the left-to-right movement by placing many smaller sections requiring you to go vertically or even right-to-left to proceed. This, and the low ceilings, aren’t exactly new concepts to Sonic, as levels like Mystic Cave from Sonic 2 attest. Unlike most of these levels, they aren’t here to slow things down, but as a way to have tighter control on level design and allow varied pacing —every level still has fast segments to them and a strong identity of its own, both elements that were always important to Sonic.
Zones are ridiculously huge, maps being up to three times the sizes of previous games’. Time Overs, which were unthinkable in Sonic 1 and 2, are extremely easy to get in a few levels like Carnival Night 2 and Sandopolis 2. In general, Sonic 3&K shifts away from a focus in speedrunning, and instead its pacing resembles more other platformers of the time: A longer, more linear experience.
Reflecting this, levels also bleed and transition into one another and even radically change in the middle of an Act, as the game’s focus shifts slightly more towards a series of experiences with a more prominent narrative through-line rather than concise obstacle courses to be conquered. In other terms, if all games were to be judged on a scale on whether they are a series of challenges like Super Mario Bros. or a series of experiences and thrills tied to a story like Uncharted, Sonic 3&K sits a tiny bit further towards Uncharted than the other Sonic games.
Why the big shift? Why longer levels that downplay speedrunning? Because Sonic 3&K has a save system.
SAVE SYSTEM
The entire point of multi-tiered level design was to keep earlier levels fresh as you would have to play them every time you booted up the game. The point of shorter levels that were strictly left-to-right was to be conducive and fun to beating them faster and faster. With a save system, the player has no need to go through a level they already beat. So does multiple paths through a level still hold any value in a game like this? We’ll get to that later.
Because there’s no demand to replay levels, a save system also allows players to beat the game faster. Concern over game length is probably the reason why levels are much longer now, and why there are Special Stages and Bonus Stages everywhere to be found and played.
BONUS STAGES
A novelty to Sonic 3&K are Bonus Stages. Not to be confused with Special Stages, these are small mini-games to obtain more Rings, 1ups, and Shields. They’re accessed by bringing 20 Rings or more to a Checkpoint, much like how Sonic 2’s Special Stages are accessed, but with a much lower bar.
Sonic 2’s Casino Night experimented with having small slot machines and pinball tables for a short fun distraction. Bonus Stages are an iteration of that idea, giving players an option for a short break in several points through the adventure instead of confining those mini-games to just one level. For variety, there are three different kinds of Bonus Stages:
Gumball Machine is the shortest Bonus Stage. It can end as quickly as a couple seconds, though seasoned players can milk power-ups out of it for half a minute. It’s short, sweet, and tied to movement mechanics used in regular play, meaning being skilled at it brings you a slight edge to the rest of the game, and vice versa.
Glowing Spheres consists of launching yourself from gravitational balls of energy onto flippers and bumpers, trying to outrace a Bonus-ending laser beam, grabbing whatever you can along the way. I find it pretty fun, and it really helps players get better at maneuvering with bumpers and flippers.
The last Bonus is the Slot Machine. It plays like Sonic 1’s Special Stage, but with a giant slot machine in the middle straight from Sonic 2’s Casino Night. It can easily be played for many minutes at a time, but it doesn’t give you power-ups, only Rings — it might even take all your Rings away if you’re unlucky. It’s boring, long, and very detrimental to the game’s pacing. (If you don’t want to play this Bonus Stage specifically, just don’t jump at the checkpoint sparkles when they’re orange.)
SPECIAL STAGES
Sonic 3&K also features new Special Stages. The best way I can briefly describe them is that they’re like a Pac-Man game played from behind Pac. Instead of dots disappearing, they become bad dots that will end the Special Stage if touched again. There are no enemies, and the longer you stay in it, the faster it’ll go, forcing you to eventually screw up and touch a bad dot.
They’re OK, I guess. Definitely better than Sonic 1’s or 2's. I did them a lot as a kid, but nowadays, I play Sonic to play Sonic, and the Special Stages get in the way of that, as they play nothing alike. They’re just about knowing where all the blue spheres are/what the intended route is and not panicking as it speeds up. When you beat a Special Stage once, there’s not much else to them.
Accessing Special Stages no longer requires Rings, significantly downplaying the frustrating requirement of previous games to collect and keep Rings. Also helping them feel less precious, Sonic 3&K’s longer levels ensures players will collect lots of Rings but also lose them throughout, making Rings feel more fleeting. This is a major improvement.
What isn’t an improvement is the way to access Special Stages — they’re warps hidden inside fake walls littered throughout the entire game. Fake walls aren’t exactly new to Sonic, but they were previously used in few levels and were hinted at in obvious ways. However, this many fake walls, and making them conceal such a desirable secret instead of less consequential shortcuts or power-ups poisons how you play the game. If you’re hellbent on finding all the Special Stage locations, you’ll probably end up bumping into nearly every wall in a level just to be sure, which… isn’t fun. Wasn’t bumping into things and stopping your movement a major criticism of Sonic games? Why is this here?!
IT’S THERE TO WASTE TIME.
My main issue with Sonic 3&K is that there’s just so much time-wasting in it. I can’t help but feel this is the result of insecurity about the game’s length due to the save system. There’s so much of it: The unnecessary cutscenes, the way the game tempts the player to access the Bonus Stages every time they’re available, to try finding all the Special Stages behind fake walls, and the presence of a Perfect Bonus inside Special Stages, asking players to stay longer in them to collect all the Rings. Also there are 14 Chaos Emeralds here instead of the usual 7, half from Sonic 3 and half from Sonic & Knuckles.
That being said, this new Special Stage access method isn’t nearly as frustrating as Sonic 2’s, and a lot of S3&K’s time-wasting is completely optional and inconsequential if you don’t want to do any of it in your playthrough. If you decide that all the Special and Bonus Stages turns the game’s pacing into a drawn out mess, you can just forego them. (…at the cost of a slightly different ending and not having the invincible, near game-breaking Hyper Sonic. But after beating the game once, you can warp to any stage, find one Special Stage warp, and keep using it to get all the Emeralds) Giving players agency over the game’s pacing is an OK solution, and I can’t scrutinize the designers too much as what they did worked. Players then wanted more content and longer experiences. RPGs were getting more and more popular worldwide, and kids — S3&K’s target audience — are less easily bored by repeated content than someone like me, an adult.
Still, the game has some unavoidable, shameless time-wasters — especially some particular bosses.
BOSSES
A lot of Sonic 3&K’s bosses’ secret, fast way of beating them is tied to smart usage of the Shield abilities. By carrying a specific Shield to some specific bosses, you’re able to hit them more often by using its midair ability. Figuring out these boss weaknesses is fun and helps the player better know when and how to use the Shield abilities effectively.
However, perhaps due to the somewhat bigger focus on storyline and spectacle, and because bosses are a straightforward way of introducing such spectacle alongside tension, Sonic 3&K has bosses after the end of every Act of every level, sometimes even more. The whole game has an absurd total of 36 different bosses.
There’s just no way a team can craft 36 unique, interesting boss fights especially in a game series (and genre) for which bosses have never been the highest points. A lot of bosses are boring, and many rely on waiting for them to damage themselves (Carnival Night 1, Flying Battery 1, Flying Battery 2 sub-boss, Sandopolis 1, Lava Reef 2, Death Egg 2), which are the most dull and uninvolved fights of the entire game (these are the shameless time-wasters mentioned previously).
I said there were 36 different bosses, but you can make the case that there are even more, as there are some slightly harder versions of the same boss battles when you play as Knuckles.
KNUCKLES
Playing as Knuckles is kind of like an alternate Hard Mode. Not just his lower jump height makes many situations harder, but Knuckles has his own unique segments through levels specially designed for his abilities, and some of his own bosses.
His level segments’ difficulty, length and quality fluctuate very unevenly. Everything is slower with his restrictive jumps, including boss battles, as quickly destroying them is no longer an option. In general, a Knuckles playthrough feels a bit like a weird ROMhack/mod of Sonic 3 & Knuckles, in a negative way.
CONCLUSION
I’m really harsh on S3&K’s elements that feel to me like padding. A lot of it can safely be ignored, but some bad bosses and bad levels cannot. That includes Sandopolis, Lava Reef, Sky Sanctuary, and (feel free to hate me, but) even a few parts of Ice Cap and Flying Battery.
That said, remember when I asked whether multi-tiered level design has value in a game like this? For a while, I was convinced that Sonic 3 & Knuckles almost completely renounced that kind of level design as part of its shift towards longer levels, but as I’ve played more of the game and attempted to beat each Zone as fast as I could, I realized that’s definitely not right.
It’s true that alternate routes took a slight backseat as levels are more linear and closed, but Sonic 3 & Knuckles still has many of them, especially smart shortcuts that require very skillful movement and usage of levels’ geometries and gimmicks. All while still featuring slower sections that are fair to newcomer players and don’t require knowing what’s coming up in advance. Out of all Mega Drive Sonic games, I recommend Sonic 3&K for newcomers the most for that reason.
In the end, Sonic 3&K knows that players will still want to play these levels again because they’re fun, even if their pacing isn’t as conducive to playing them over and over. It knows that games like RPGs and Super Mario World were huge and set certain trends and standards (completionist, secret-hunting play and a save system) that Sonic had to follow. Sonic 3&K then uses that shift to appease newcomers while at the same time, turning those completionist impulses to scavenge levels for secrets to hint toward another way to play— one about beating levels fast and minimizing loss of momentum.
More so than other Sonic games, every level of Sonic 3 & Knuckles is completely different than the next one and mostly featuring many varied, fun level gimmicks that work really well with each other and the nuances of Sonic’s movement. Despite pacing issues, Sonic 3 & Knuckles is the most well-rounded Sonic game, and it is filled to the brim with content, though, similar to previous games, not all of it is stellar.
REVIEW SERIES CONCLUSION
Each Sonic game, despite being united by very similar uniquely Sonic mechanics, controls and level design, each strongly feel like their own flavor of it when inspected closely. I hope my review series properly relayed that, alongside their strengths and weaknesses, and why I feel so strongly about these games.
This is technically the end of the series of reviews of the main Mega Drive Sonic games, but of course, this also served as a critical retrospective so I can properly compare the upcoming Sonic Mania to them once it comes out and hopefully write a review of it using these articles as a base to analyze it in-depth. See you then!
