Looking back at 2D Sonic: Sonic 3 (& Knuckles! & the Lock On! & Corporate Mandates!)

This article is part of a series on 2D Sonic games. Chronology is somewhat important as I’ll be referencing qualities from prior games to compare and contrast. If you’d like to read those before getting started here, you can find Sonic 1 here and Sonic 2 (& CD) here.

Here we are, finally. The fourth (and fifth….by technicality) entry in Sonic’s 16-bit platforming lineup: Sonic 3 (& Knuckles!) I spent a long time thinking about how I’d even pen this thing, do I treat both parts as separate games? Do I treat them as one? Do I fall in between and craft a compelling narrative about fence-sitting into this Sonic article? Ultimately, I’ve decided to just treat it as one game, so for all intents and purposes we’ll be looking at Sonic 3 & Knuckles, what many consider to be one of the best 2D Sonic games ever made.

There’s been many an article on the development of this game, and frankly for the purposes of these articles (documenting my impressions of these games) it would actually inflate this thing to astronomic proportions, but suffice it to say: Sonic 3 & Knuckles had quite the cycle. From a myriad of factors, chiefly the size of the project itself and an impending release deadline, the decision had to be made to split it into two different cartridges: Sonic 3, and Sonic & Knuckles. What does this look like in practice? Well, if you own a Sonic 3 cartridge you’ll know it looks like a normal Genesis cartridge in its shape. If you also happen to own a Sonic & Knuckles cartridge, you’ll know it looks like a freak of nature, and for good reason! To actually play Sonic 3 & Knuckles, you have to lock the damn Sonic 3 cart onto your Sonic & Knuckles cartridge. This method of loading up a game was pretty novel at the time, but if you had a Super Nintendo and were deeply into the idea of a religious FPS, Super Noah’s Ark 3D also used this method to evade the Super Nintendo’s protection against unlicensed games, so if you somehow grew up with that, this is old hat for you!

There is somehow a correlation. Both of these look so strange especially in the modern day.

We’re getting way off topic here, but I’m bringing this up because the Sonic & Knuckles cart had a really cool feature — you could lock it onto a cart. I know I just said that, but think about that again: what happens if you lock it onto other cartridges? Well, it turns out if you lock it onto a Sonic 2 cartridge, you can play as Knuckles in Sonic 2! Wow! He’s 100% fully functional too with all of his moves from Sonic 3 & Knuckles, and barring one strange change to his play control he works perfectly. I couldn’t mention this at all in the Sonic 2 review because naturally this dropped a good bit after that game’s release, but what a cool way to utilize this feature for more than just its main attraction. You can also lock it onto Sonic 1, but sadly you don’t get Knuckles in that game. You DO get the Blue Spheres game though, which lets you play Sonic 3 & Knuckles’s patented bonus stages with an impossibly high amount of randomly generated variants and a pretty robust password system. If you lock this thing onto any other random cartridges it will also load up a Blue Sphere layout based on the data on the cartridge, so you can totally play around with all of the games in your collection!

Could you imaagine how cool this was back in the day???

Ok, with all of that preamble out of the way, let’s talk about the actual game! This game’s story is actually pretty ambitious compared to the other Sonic titles, and it plays out in two acts. Following Sonic’s destruction of the Death Egg in Sonic 2, Eggman crash lands onto Angel Island. Learning that it’s actually a floating island that utilizes the power of the Master Emerald, he sets a plan into motion: trick the Master Emerald’s guardian Knuckles into helping him by painting Sonic and Tails as a villainous force, and use Knuckles’s power to steal not just the Chaos Emeralds, but the Master Emerald as well! Knuckles, being easy to trick as he’s never met Eggman before and has generally remained alone on the island guarding the Master Emerald, is immediately tricked and together with Eggman he manages to snatch the Chaos Emeralds from Sonic in a sneak attack as Sonic makes it onto the island. As it progresses and Sonic traverses more and more of the island, eventually Eggman’s motives are directly revealed to Knuckles, and they team up to take down the newly launched Death Egg straight out of space, restoring the Master Emerald and all of the Chaos Emeralds to their rightful place on Angel Island.

Knuckles makes his glorious debut here! Look at how cool he is!!!!

So hey, it’s not the most novel narrative, but it’s the most involved so far! It has a new rival for Sonic in Knuckles, who ended up becoming my favorite Sonic character of all time for those who don’t already know, and it has a pretty rudimentary but effective character dynamic of Knuckles being one step ahead of Sonic for the whole game until the very end. Knuckles being able to knock the Chaos Emeralds right out of Super Sonic and his many, MANY traps and hazards set up in advance set him up as Sonic’s rival really effectively, and it pairs really nicely with the associated marketing. Sonic 3 got some nice ads for sure, but the Sonic & Knuckles logo is so iconic, and the dynamic it captures between both characters down to how their colors oppose is just…..perfection. This story also plays out really smoothly in-game thanks to a huge variety of cutscenes. There were glimpses of this at the end of Sonic 2, but Sonic 3 & Knuckles make use of them throughout the whole game. Beyond just showing how crafty Knuckles is and giving the characters more personality, these cutscenes also tie each zone together well and make the island feel like a really coherent, connected place. This game was very much the beginning of Sonic’s greater emphasis on a driving story and narrative, something you’d see evolve further in the 3D outings that came after this game on the Dreamcast. The fact that you can see little fragments of it here is really cool, and it makes the game better for it.

The aesthetic style of Sonic 3 & Knuckles has also seen some changes. I could class Sonic 1, 2, and CD all within a similar category. Sure the fidelity improved across all three of them as time went on, but they all have a shared basic look to em’. Sonic 3 & Knuckles shifts this entirely, focusing less on surrealist environments and odd geometry and more on lush natural landscapes. It pairs nicely with the game’s added detail — the mastery over the Genesis hardware shows with this game, the tiles and backgrounds are far more complex. Hydrocity’s background shows off some awesome parallax coupled with a pseudo-3D effect on the water, and it really only builds up from there: later zones have lots of moving pieces and changing colors. You’ll get that cool heat-wave effect in Sandopolis Act 1 and immediately in the next zone you’ll see a huge array of visual changes and palette transitions in Lava Reef, it’s all quite impressive looking, and it doesn’t even compromise on the game’s performance compared to Sonic 2 either!

Sandopolis has a wonderfully detailed sky gradient and an excellent heat-wave effect that makes the stage feel just SWELTERING.

About the only thing I could say is that while I do love the look of the game overall, I think I prefer the general aesthetic direction of prior entries a bit. It’s hard not to yearn for what Sonic CD had to offer, but Sonic 2’s sense of style is one I’ve ended up liking more as a whole. I do have to give credit to Sonic 3 & Knuckles for making use of the many scrapped ideas for Sonic 2, you’ve got the ice hill stage, the forest stage, and hell even Hidden Palace shows up here as a regular stage (though it’s more of a transitory stage meant to advance the narrative here)! I have to give additional credit where it’s due as well, they used a lot of the old scrapped level concepts from Sonic 2’s development in this game. You’ll find an icy hillside stage, at least two wooded forest looking levels, a proper desert stage…..it’s nice to see so many of that game’s cut content managed to find its way into another game, let alone to have it realized so well!

The visuals did take a hit in one area though, and that’s player sprites. Knuckles and Tails look well enough though I’ve definitely seen better Knuckles sprites in other games, but what the heck happened to Sonic? It wasn’t always like this either, in many of the betas Sonic was using his old Sonic 2 sprites, but the redrawn ones just look unfinished. The depth of the shading has been removed, the spines don’t look sharp, his proportions are all over the place, there’s such a huge bucket list of errors I have with his look in this game. On top of that you can tell they didn’t finish all of the sprites because not only does he still revert to default frames in his Super form occasionally, he also turns into the Sonic 2 sprites on certain frames in general! I will say this about Sonic’s look though, I love how expressive his facial area is, that’s one area of definite improvement at the very least. It doesn’t really amend my issues with his sprites in general, but at least it wasn’t all downgraded.

Hey, wait a second….

I only mentioned the music off-hand when talking about Sonic 2 in the last article, and I do feel like I did that game’s fantastic music a small disservice in that way. Sonic 3 & Knuckles however steps it up even further with what I’d call the strongest overall soundtrack of the Genesis lineup. The variety in music is incredible and it all sounds punchy and awesome. I have to give particular commendations to Hydrocity, Mushroom Hill, and Sandopolis for having phenomenal musical leitmotifs across both of their acts, and really there’s no misses here: it’s all just damn good. I couldn’t write this without mentioning the fact that Michael Jackson and his audio team, predominantly Brad Buxer, also contributed music to the Sonic 3 portion of the soundtrack. While it was initially considered one of those spicier gaming rumors, it was eventually given credibility by Buxer himself in an interview. It’s not as if it was THAT well hidden, there was a number of tells from the start — the game’s soundtrack changing for its PC re-release, and the Sonic 3 tracks by Buxer and Jackson have very strange Act 2 variations: they’re just the same song with instruments altered or removed. It does stand out quite a bit despite the strength of the songs themselves, and it didn’t get any easier for SEGA to de-confirm these rumors when Hard Times by the Jetzons (a band Buxer was in) was unearthed and released to the public, the similarities were obvious right away: this is just Ice Cap Zone! It’s why if you look at the comments of any Ice Cap soundtrack upload on YouTube, you’ll always see a reference to the song. Quite the particular angle, using a Sonic game to release your previously unreleased single from a band you worked with, but it’s an appropriate kind of rabbit hole for this franchise I’d say.

Core gameplay remains the same in this entry, straight from Sonic 2. I’m happy to say there’s one spot that received a serious overhaul for the first time in this franchise, and it’s the power-ups! The staples all return like the speed shoes and the invincibility power-up, but the shields have been reworked entirely. Instead of the stock shield, now they’re ELEMENTAL and fancy. Electric, water, and fire are all accounted for, and provide protection from their respective elements, hell if you’re playing as Sonic you get an additional ability for each that involve manipulating your movement in the air! Character choice also matters more than it did in Sonic 2. Where it was entirely cosmetic for the most part in that game, here characters actually have their own abilities. Sonic has the aforementioned shield powers, but without a shield he has access to another ability, the aptly named Insta-Shield. It lets him become invulnerable briefly and also extends his attacking range, making it a high-skill ceiling ability with a lot of great use cases in spite of it being far from the first ability I’d think of for a character like Sonic. Tails can finally fly as a playable character (and even swim!), and as such he can transition from level routes in ways Sonic can’t and can explore vertical passages with ease. He comes highly recommended if you’re new or want to explore the stages more thoroughly.

The flight feels so snappy and smooth, and while it does cut your momentum if used carelessly, when you know where to do it and how you can maintain some serious speeds!

Knuckles is the star of the show as far as new characters go, what with his plastering all over the marketing and his pivotal role in the plot. In contrast to his rival, he can’t jump as high, but he has a glide, a wall climb, and the passive ability to simply break walls and destructible objects by merely colliding with them. His skill-set is pretty simple, but the glide allows you to achieve unparalleled vertical and horizontal distance combined if you utilize its physics well, and the wall-climb lets him explore in ways even Tails can’t! Tying the bow on all of this is just the elegance: all of these abilities work with just one button, and they all work intuitively too. Sure, they COULD have used all three buttons on the controller, but they chose to really dig into the root of what made the other Sonic games so appealing, their relative control simplicity interwoven with the complexity of its mechanics.

Scaling tough surfaces? Not a problem at all!

The level design’s also seen an evolution. At a glance you’d think it similar to Sonic 2, and you’d be right. Levels have multiple interlocked pathways that you can switch between occasionally, with some routes being faster and shorter. The difference lies in all of the details. In Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Special Stages are actually hidden within the stages themselves. No more hoarding rings and hunting checkpoints, instead you’re encouraged to use the abilities of your chosen character to seek out these big rings and collect the Chaos Emeralds. Rings still play a pivotal role if you want to nab power-ups and accumulate even more of them though, because checkpoints can still teleport you to bonus stages of sorts if you pass em’ with enough rings in tow. Boss fights pepper the end of every act now rather than being solely at the end of each zone which serves as a nice smooth bridge between the cutscenes interspersed between stages. Even with these elements in mind, the biggest design changes come with how elaborate the levels are this go around. Setpieces are far more complex, with mechanics like anti-gravity, spinning tops that have their own control scheme, pulleys and swinging devices with robust physics and dynamic interactions based on timing…..it’s a far flashier experience than the other 2D games throughout its entire run-time.

HELP

Sonic 3 & Knuckles also brings a huge emphasis on level routes, and I don’t simply mean the usual Sonic fare of a high path and a low path that interconnect for you to explore. Many times you’ll be vaulted into a fork in the stage progression, usually in the form of a jump slightly too high for Knuckles to make or a wall that Sonic simply can’t smash, other times you’ll simply start at a lower or higher route that you’re locked into for a while. It gets extra diverse when you consider that Knuckles even gets to skip entire zones more or less! These serve as key redirection points that blunt you into a more focused challenge if you’re playing as Knuckles, as these routes make use of his gliding and climbing abilities through very simple but fun spike room puzzles. Further spicing up the Knuckles routes is the fact that Knuckles has his own little mini-story too! He takes on Egg Robo throughout his journey, complete with his own final boss. Cumulatively it just amounts to some harder stages and background changes, but it’s nice to see the care put in to making sure the story is congruent across all of the character playthroughs should you decide to do one for each.

Not only does Knuckles get to scrap with Egg-Robo, his final boss fight is extra cool! As an additional note, all of the backgrounds change to reflect that it takes place well after Sonic’s left the area.

It sure does sound really grand and elaborate, and I can’t deny that Sonic 3 & Knuckles makes a ton of advancements that really improve and reshape the 2D Sonic formula while keeping what made Sonic 2 work so well. Unfortunately it did come with a cost, and it’s one you’re probably noticing by now in comparison to what came beforehand: the scope. Sonic 2 stands as a modestly sized game that rewards consistent playtime and mastery of its level-to-level mechanics and design, and while this game is no different, as a whole Sonic 3 & Knuckles is essentially two games stapled together. The implications of this manifest in a few ways, the level difficulty curve is all over the place and kind of inconsistent: you go from Launch Base to Mushroom Hill and you can really see the dip in difficulty. The developers were very much aware of this as many Sonic 3 stages got a little easier if you locked on a Sonic & Knuckles cart, but these stage adjustments do little to smooth out the bumps in the curve.

You also run into the problem of bloat: remember those Special Stages I talked about? Blue Spheres? Yeah they’re pretty fun, I’d say I like them a little more than Sonic 2’s overall, and you still get the same reward for clearing seven of them and getting the emeralds (and yes, Tails still has no base Super form…). Then you get to Mushroom Hill and….hey, what’s that rainbow colored ring do? It whisks you away, takes your emeralds, and now you’re tasked with doing ANOTHER seven special stages to power up the Chaos Emeralds into the SUPER EMERALDS to unlock Hyper forms….an upgrade that’s largely redundant unless you’re Tails, in which case you finally get a transformation! Fourteen bonus stages doesn’t sound that bad, but for as much as I love Blue Spheres I can’t deny that it takes you out of the game for a little longer than I’d like even at just doing seven, and I should clarify: you don’t actually need the Super Emeralds to get the good ending, it’s just a little bonus for dedicated players.

Oh boy…..more of em’…..

While the Special Stages serve as a great example of the underlying faults that do lie in this game’s approach, they’re also not the only instance of it. I talked about how elaborate the stage gimmicks are, and the vast majority are really awesome and fluid, but for every couple that are good you run into one that’s really rough. Sandopolis Act 2 is just stuffed full of autoscrollers (if you’re playing as Knuckles you get an EVEN LONGER version of this stage) and this really undercuts its dynamic and well-executed lights on/off gimmick. I couldn’t write this article without mentioning the infamous Carnival Night barrel, a setpiece designed so badly that it’s become an iconic Sonic in-joke, it has a coffee mug for God’s sake! You just get locked into a room and have to figure out that you can even influence this weird floating barrel to move up and down via the D-pad. It’s rough! I do have to attribute it to being the reason I played as Knuckles and grew so fond of the character in my youth though: he just skips this section (and this zone, really) and gets straight to the better parts of the game. I haven’t even mentioned bosses, while they’re pretty similar to Sonic 2 with improvements across the board for the most part, a handful of them fall victim to some of the issues of bloating and repetition, special mentions going to the Lava Reef Act 2 boss and the Death Egg Act 2 boss as examples. These two really stand out even amidst some other weaker boss fights in this game, Lava Reef’s boss for being just unbearably long with no real deviations in its pattern and Death Egg’s Act 2 boss for being solved by merely walking back and forth over a prolonged period of time.

Infinite content! (Quite literally…..)

Aspects like this are usually what come up in the era long debate that is still going on to this day with regards to Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 & Knuckles, and I think it’s a fair conversation topic. Sure Sonic 2’s polish rubs off a little by the tail end of its runtime, but it’s hard to deny just how good it’s paced and how great it is at rolling you through its entire runtime without too much of a hitch. Sonic 3 & Knuckles doesn’t quite operate like that: it’s a little bumpier because of its commitment to its vision. That commitment though? It’s what makes it one of my favorite games of all time. It WAS my favorite Sonic game for a very long time, and it emphasizes something I love so much about the Classic Sonic quadrilogy: they don’t suffer from iterative design. When I think of something like Mega Man or other franchises of its ilk, it’s hard to say it was a net benefit that each of its sequels were designed the way they were. Sure I love all of them but for many people it just led to a lot of franchise fatigue, a fatigue that made things like Mega Man X and Mega Man Battle Network so necessary for the franchise: it needed that injection of fresh, zesty new ideas.

Classic Sonic meanwhile charts a new path in each of these games: you can trace individual elements back to something they TRIED in Sonic 1, but Sonic 1 isn’t really designed like Sonic 2, which isn’t designed like Sonic CD, and so forth. They’re ALL worth trying at the very least, because as sequels and as games they’re all really experimental and different! Sonic 3 & Knuckles stands out as my favorite of these four simply because I love what it succeeds at enough to not worry about what it struggles with. Sonic 2 is for sure a more well-rounded experience, but I just can’t ignore how wonderfully ambitious and creative Sonic 3 & Knuckles is, and how it lays out the groundwork for this entire franchise going forward with its greater focus on a narrative progression and how tied into the world that narrative is. It’s the first of these games with what I’d call a real character dynamic beyond “Sonic vs. Eggman”, and I think that’s worth lauding on its own.

Look, you even get Super & Hyper Knuckles! What more could you ask for, really?

Getting a hold of this game is….a little tougher these days, but two primary ways spring to mind. The first is naturally Sonic Origins, which has all of the other Classic games in it too. There are definite caveats to the Origins version of Sonic 3 & Knuckles though, the Sonic 3 music done by Jackson and his music team have been replaced with the alternative tracks they used in the PC re-release, but they sound even less full and complete than the versions found in the beta. If you’re playing on Origins Plus, you also get Amy as a bonus playable! She’s not particularly in-depth or robust, she’s more of a side-grade to Sonic with no shield abilities, but the sprites are cute!

The other way to play, and the one I tend to recommend if you have the means, is Sonic 3 Angel Island Revisited, shortened to A.I.R. It’s built off of the original rom, which it searches for via your Steam library. At one point you could purchase Sonic 3 & Knuckles on Steam for around two dollars for the Sega Genesis collection SEGA had up on there, but since the release of Origins all of those games have been delisted, so if you don’t have a copy now you’ll find it a little harder to get started with A.I.R., but it’s most assuredly worth it. Not only is it the means in which I’ve nabbed all of the screenshots for this article, but it serves as the most accurate widescreen port of this game! It runs using the original game’s code and files as a base, so almost everything that worked in the original release works here, on top of tons of additional features like the Drop Dash and a robust amount of mod support and game customization options like reduced hits on certain long boss fights (looking at you Lava Reef Act 2….) and toggles like being able to speed up block pushing in Sandopolis. All of these features combined with its accuracy make it the version I go back to most, but really you can’t go wrong with ANY version of this masterpiece, so pick which one you can access the easiest.

Listen, any amount of speed improvements are welcome here. They even have a bevy of other tweaks and wonderful user-end customization!

Whew! Sorry this one took so long. It’s gone through so many revisions and I’m still not positive I’d be able to finish this unless I posted it now. As for what I’m writing on next with regards to 2D Sonic? We’ll be traversing ALL THREE Sonic Advance games in one article. God help me. I’ll need a bit of time to drum up the motivation for it, so look forward to it when it’s ready. Cheers, and thanks again for reading all of this if you have. It’s been a blast to write.

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