The Last Time Sega Cared About Sonic? | Why Sonic Unleashed Still Matters

Timestamps:
Intro-0:00
Game/Story Overview-2:16
Day Stages-9:27
Night Stages 14:42
Sun and Moon Medals-24:50
Conclusion-27:45

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Sonic as a brand is probably in the best state it's been in since the late 2000s. We’ve got a string of successful movies, a new cartoon, the games are breaking series sales records, all in all I’d say its an exciting time to be a sonic fan. But for some reason, I can't shake this feeling that something about the newer games is….off. I enjoyed Frontiers for what it was, but something about it just never sat right with me, and for a while I couldn't really figure out why. So, in pursuit of answers, and because I’ve lost control of my life, I decided to replay a bunch of older sonic games to try and figure out what had changed between now and then. For the most part, my thoughts on these games have stayed pretty much the same over the years, and as time has gone on I’ve come to appreciate more and more aspects of each respective game. But one game in particular stood out to me during these replays, and helped me come to terms with what I think the series is missing at present. That game, of course, was Sonic Unleashed.

Sonic Unleashed was the first Sonic game I ever played, and it's been my favorite game in the series for over a decade at this point. I grew up primarily with the Wii version, so you can imagine my surprise when I later got a PS3 and realized there was a completely different version of this game I was already playing a lot of. My 9 year old brain was blown. But I haven't sat down and played either version from start to finish in a few years, and upon doing so recently, I found myself noticing a lot more of this game's nuances than I had before. There's a lot of things in this game that I think the series has been lacking in recently, and I think taking some of those ideas and practices and applying them to the modern stuff would help the series flourish even more that it is right now. So let's all take an extended look at Sonic Unleashed, and talk about why it still matters in 2024.