The best feature of the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise is not speed, Sonic, his furry friends, Dr. Eggman, or even blast processing. The best thing about the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise is the humble ring.
If you have been ignoring the Even Worse Streams section of the site (updated every Monday!), you have missed my ongoing effort to steer Sonic (at least partially) through every 2-D Sonic the Hedgehog title ever released. And why would I do such a thing?! Well, it is not because Sonic the Hedgehog games are fun. Don’t yell at me! They are generally fun, but there are a thousand fun games out there I could be enjoying with friends on a Tuesday night. No, the main reason I decided to blast through the whole of the 2-D Sonic the Hedgehog library is that I know I can make progress in any Sonic the Hedgehog game. You run left to right, you fight a boss every two or three acts, and you eventually see a space station explode. Do you have to collect every Chaos Emerald? Complete every special stage? Beat more than two levels of Sonic Rivals? No. You can get the Sonic the Hedgehog experience without ever once scoring 100% completion. You do not need a pocket full of blue balls to know that Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles is great, nor do you have to have find every secret to confirm that Sonic Blast is a kick to the mean bean machine. Sonic the Hedgehog is a franchise that produces 2-D games that can easily be understood inside of an evening.
And there is one reason why, unlike some games, you will not spend all night repeating Act 1 over and over again. It is Sonic’s not-so-secret rings.
Sonic the Hedgehog did not start in the arcades (ignore Rad Mobile). There was never a universe where Sonic the Hedgehog had to die so a player would insert more coins. This is not Altered Beast or Final Fight or every fighting game on Earth where the “Continue?” screen was integral to the experience. Sonic was allowed to live. And, as Sonic was permitted to survive for a period greater than two minutes, Sonic was gifted with a “life meter” never seen before. Sonic can take infinite hits, just so long as he has a single ring on hand. But there is a catch! Give or take possessing a shield, Sonic loses all rings on contact with an enemy, whether he holds one or 300. What’s more, when he loses said rings, they scatter around his immediate area in random bunches, so reclaiming your lost rings can be difficult. Or easy! It depends! But what is important is that it gives the player a choice: do you try to reclaim as many rings as possible, or speed forward, assuming you do not need to regather your lost bounty? God help us all: does this make Sonic the Hedgehog an ancestor of Dark Souls’ corpse runs? Or is it just good game design to give a player a choice about how to recover? Whatever the case, the result is the same: if you can hold on to a ring or two, you can conquer nigh any challenge, and eventually save the day through sheer attrition. Sonic will make progress, and it is all thanks to the glorious ring.
And when you make a Sonic the Hedgehog game without understanding the value of rings, then there is (more than triple) trouble.
May as well address the allegations that come up every time you mention Tails’ starring roles: Tails’ Skypatrol is not a Sonic the Hedgehog game. For one thing, Tails’ Skypatrol stars Tails, and Sonic does not appear for even a second (he at least popped in for the ending of Knuckles’ Chaotix). For another thing, there is overwhelming evidence that Tails’ Skypatrol was never designed as a Tails/Sonic game in the first place. Developers JSH have admitted that Tails’ Skypatrol was originally intended for a license that fell through (likely something Disney, as there are early screenshots of Tails battling Kingdom Hearts/Goofy antagonist Pete), and Tails was inserted with a badnik or two (I recognize that turtle!) to secure the Sega license. So Eggman does not appear at any point in this adventure, and the antagonists are a trio of forgotten furries plus one generic witch. And despite being perfect Happy Meal toys, none of these creatures are ever seen again in the franchise. Excusing a comic adaption that may or may not exist exclusively so a writer can say, “Hey, remember when this happened?” Tails’ Skypatrol never had anything to do with Sonic the Hedgehog, and it never would again.
But there is one thing about Tails’ Skypatrol that is consistent with the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise: Tails has a ring. The Boomering is responsible for the most interesting parts of Tails’ Skypatrol. Basically, Tails now controls like he is living in a shoot ‘em up. He is always flying, and the screen is always scrolling forward (mostly). But this is not a shooter where hammering on your attack button is the route to victory. Your Boomering can be used to attack enemies, but it also can be rotated around Tails like a shield. And while that does seem like the ideal way to keep enemies at bay, you do not want to be in shield mode forever: the Boomering is also how Tails can interact with the world. There is candy you must obtain (because Tails needs sugar), and various (absolutely essential) switches, weights, balloons, and hoops that will aid Tails in his skypatrolling. You can only interact with these objects when you are idling and not actively using your Boomering, though, so a Prone Tails is not necessarily a Safe Tails. Basically, the Boomering is your multitool that will keep Tails aloft in more ways than one.
But it won’t keep Tails alive.
Tails’ Skypatrol does not have a health meter. You have an “energy meter”, but that functions more like a timer, and retrieving candy to refill that is more akin to adding time to the clock. And that timer will never kill you anyway. Long before Tails runs out of energy, he will be dead, because Tails is as fragile as your average BlueSky poster (zing!). Touch any sharp edge of any inanimate object, and Tails is dead. Touch a rotating “door” at the exact wrong time, and Tails is dead. Touch an enemy, and Tails will miraculously not die, but he will tumble through the air, and if you do not immediately recover, Tails will touch the ground, and die. Basically, you can (and will) die within three inches of any level start or respawn point, and the odds of reaching the goal of any stage are practically nil. Tails is damned by his own friability, and Sonic will be sweeping pieces of his little buddy under the rug so as not to anger the Fox Police and wind up on a True Crimes of the Hedgehog podcast (sorry, this tangent got away from me).
It is hard to describe how quickly this separates Tails’ Skypatrol from even being in the same genre as Sonic the Hedgehog. They are both 2-D action games with furry protagonists facing down armies of opponents and the occasional boss to top a level. But Sonic gets knocked down, and he gets right back up again. Tails is restarting from the beginning (or one of the intermittent and erratic checkpoints) after every mistake. Sonic gets a world to explore, while Tails is stuck with a continual “challenge” that bars progress behind either memorization or an instantaneous recognition of every possible trick and trap along the way. As a result, Sonic the Hedgehog (1) can be completed inside of an hour or two if you know what you are doing. Later Sonic the Hedgehog titles take a little longer, but even Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles, arguably double the size of the average game, will “only” take 3 hours by a veteran Sonic fan (and we have proof). Tails’ Skypatrol, if played expertly, can be completed in approximately 25 minutes. The world record is two seconds shy of seven minutes.
There is simply less game in Tails’ Skypatrol because its design expects you to die over and over again. Sonic the Hedgehog is built to last thanks to his precious rings, and it means he can access more amazing zones and fight more fascinating bosses. And, as we are all living in the glorious future, we know what style has influenced gaming more. Whether you are looking at The Tarnished or Mina the Hollower, the protagonists of these modern masterpieces can only survive their expansive worlds thanks to thoughtful health systems. Sonic the Hedgehog’s greatest legacy is not speed, or level design, or mascots with attitude, it is a hero that is going to live to see a final boss. Sonics rings keep him and his legacy alive.
And Tails’ Skypatrol crashes and burns.
FGC #743 Tails’ Skypatrol
- System: This was a Japan-exclusive Game Gear title, but then wound up on Sonic the Hedgehog collections going back to the Nintendo Gamecube/Playstation 2 era. Technically, thanks to Sonic Origins, you can say this is a Switch 2 game.
- Number of players: Tails, the perennial player two, is all alone.
- What’s in a name: This is Tails’ Skypatrol, and the ostensible sequel is Tails Adventure (no apostrophe). For the record, Tails Adventure also does not understand how rings work, as they are more like hit points in that one.
- Favorite Stage: Metal Island, the third level, is a wide-open air force assault akin to the finale of Sonic the Hedgehog 2. This makes it the best level by miles, as the open spaces mean you are not going to bonk into an instantly deadly wall every three seconds. Also, the boss here is my favorite opponent, Carrottia the Bunny, who I am pretty sure is an airborne Fraggle.
Worst Stage: The opening Training Area offers nothing but death. You will learn how to play this game on the corpses of a thousand fox buddies.- Adding insult to injury: When you obtain the temporary invincibility powerup, Tails just bounces backwards off walls. So they have the technology! They could have made it so hitting a wall just drains a little bit of energy, or makes you lose rings! But no! They chose to make it instantly fatal! Like monsters!
- Say something nice: Despite being an official “romhack” of some unknown license (again, likely Disney related, but nobody’s talkin’), this does generally look like a Sonic game. There are airships, palm trees, and even the caves have a sort of “mechanical base” thing going on. Say what you will about Tails’ Skypatrol not understanding how Sonic the Hedgehog works (I just did for like a thousand words), but it does at least have the aesthetic.
- Further Complaints: The bosses are the only enemies you must defeat, and the hit detection on those monsters is terrible. You are expected to participate in some sort of risk/reward system where the only way to do any damage (and thus beat the boss before your energy runs out) is get close to prickly opponents to slam them into walls… but you are 100% beholden to whether or not your Boomering will actually latch onto an opponent. And if it doesn’t? Well, you already know about the fragility of Tails.
- An End: All of the bosses can fly, and have a full range of motion… except Witchcart, the final boss, who rides in her (eponymous?) cart. This makes the final boss… uh… sorta easier? Like, she is fast, but you know where she is going to show up because, ya know, cart track. Whatever. Just be glad something in this game is straightforward.
Did you know? The first (full) stage is titled Rail Canyon, and that name would later be reused as a stage in Sonic Heroes. This confirms that no one on Sonic Team USA ever even considered playing Tails’ Skypatrol.- Would I play again: I am glad I now know the horrors of Tails’ Skypatrol, but I am never going back to it again. It only ever exists on compilations of Sonic the Hedgehog games! And that means I could play literally any other Sonic the Hedgehog game! So Tails will never have a starring role in my heart again.
What’s next? The end of the month means the Smash Bros. Challenge is back, so we are moving from the yellow fox to the yellow rat, Pikachu! Please look forward to it!