“Mystic Mansion,” meanwhile, is a shockingly muscular house jam featuring a theremin-evoking synth line and blasts of guitar and church bell.īut ultimately, these standouts are not enough to make up for the soundtrack’s blunders, the biggest offenders here being the vocal tracks. The corresponding stage’s big gimmick are magical switches that flip the entire level upside down, revealing new paths forward “Hang Castle” is accordingly divided into two seamlessly integrated parts, with the “right-side-up” version featuring swinging synths and faraway orchestra where the “upside-down” version has up-close cello and a manipulated vocal. “Hang Castle” nails E-rated spookiness nicely, with many of its components cloaked in effects that make them sound like they’re playing from a phonograph. Surprisingly, though, two of the clear highlights on the album buck this trend: the conjoined pair of “Hang Castle” and “Mystic Mansion,” which soundtrack a pair of stages in a haunted house environment.
Like anyone who’s worked on the games as long as he has would be, Senoue is also very tapped into the importance of that speed sensation - most of these tracks race along at a healthy clip, and the rhythm sections very, very rarely stop chugging along.
Unfortunately, this can be a double-edged sword: series composer Jun Senoue has a knack for writing catchy melodies (“Power Plant,” “Casino Park”), but when he fails to (“Rail Canyon,” “Egg Fleet”) the lack of stylistic divergence means there’s absolutely nothing to make a given track stand out. The sonic consistency is, honestly, one of the most impressive parts of the soundtrack there was clearly a carved-in-stone house style for this game in a way that SA2 lacked. The score, too, retracts its range to mostly rock and techno, though there are some rather unnecessary orchestral histrionics during the reveal of and confrontation with the game’s final boss. The gameplay differs across character selection only in difficulty.
Sonic Heroes was the next flagship Sonic game following SA2, and it reigns this expansiveness in somewhat. Sonic Adventure 2 is a great case study for this - the game threw a lot of stuff at the wall (the aforementioned treasure hunting! Third-person run-and-gun! Kart racing! Tamagotchi!) and so its soundtrack is all over the place, encompassing rock, techno, jazz, and really, really bad hip-hop across a whiplash-inducing range of tones from the ultra-cutesy chao race themes to the gloomy wannabe-industrial that scores most of Shadow the Hedgehog’s stages. These variations on the gameplay have given rise to matching aesthetic tweaks, and nowhere is this truer than in the series’ music.
Sonic games have long struggled to try to branch out from and/or find refreshing approaches to “the sensation of speed.” They’ve thrown cars, hoverboards, and guns at it they’ve tried to tack on treasure hunting and role-playing and werewolf combat there’ve been spinoffs that featured pinball and playing cards and Smash Bros.-style arena brawling nothing has stuck beyond a game or two. The main, distinctive appeal of a Sonic game isn’t some rock-solid core mechanic, compelling narrative, or deep gameplay - it’s the sensation (nay, the illusion) of speed. He was born purely from corporate strategizing, an attempt on SEGA’s part to be everything that Nintendon’t, and was about as built to last as the dot com bubble. Speaking as a lapsed but longtime and rather die-hard Sonic the Hedgehog fan, I am here to tell you that Sonic - as a character and a premise for a game franchise - is fundamentally flawed.